A rock solid reliable sage system

[Jesse]

Hi,

My sage install has been fairly stable until lately and I am hoping to kind of revamp things in order to get the maximum stability out of my system.

Here is what I have got: Main sage machine p4 3.0 1 gig ram, intel 865perl mobo, ATI 9800pro, pvr500mce, two maudio D410sound cards, two vbox catseye usb HD tuners, usb uirt, usb serial hub (for serial control of two Directv tuners), 120gb drive for windows, apps, and music files, 500 gb drive for ripped movies, one 400 gb and two 300 gb drives for sage recordings. This box is also used for playback in my familyroom (36" SDTV), whole house audio (via JRiver Media Center and the two maudio cards) and MainLobby server. When this machine is up (whichis 24x7) it is running Sagetv (V 4.1.6), JRMC,Mainlobby Server, Girder, Maudio Delta Control Panel, Avast Anti-Virus, and intel activemonitor. This machine is also my "server" for my MVP client and my HD PC client.


Running all of this will usually swallow about half of the ram, but when not playing video the processor is usually running at <5%. Even when recording two shows,playing back a DVD, serving up an HD file to my client pc and playing back five different songs to five differentzones the processor is still only running between 40%-50%. It does not seem like all of this is too much work for the hardware.

As mentioned above the rest of my system consists of an MVP client and a full pc client.

The MVP has been pretty spotty. I usually just put the mvp to sleep when I am done watching rather than power it off. Sometimes it will loose its connection to sage and need to reboot and sometimes it will come awake and work just fine without needing a reboot. Sometimes it boots right up and works great, but sometimes it will refuse to boot. Obviously restarting sage on the server, or rebooting the server, leads to a reboot of the mvp. Lately it has gotten worse. I often have to unplug the power and network cables from the mvpand let it sit for a good while before it will boot. Having read on the forums that V5 works great with the mvp I decided to upgrade......

Things seemed fine at first, but then I discovered that the sever would loose video output after a short while (within minutes). Audio would continue, and sometimes sage would respond to the remote, but the screen would just go black. After trying a bunch of stuff I sent in a bug report and some logs. The guys at sage tech said it was a known bug related to using 3D acceleration that would be fixed in V5.1. Strangely, the pc client has experienced no such problem using V5. So I roll the server back to 4.1.6 and it hoses my hd tuner drivers. Iremove and re-install the vbox tuners and drivers and so all seems well. Since it all seems good I leave V5 on the pc client. Well the mvphas become more problematic than ever and sage has taken to quitting right from the system tray on both the server and the client. My wife is a patient woman and she never complains, but I know this is getting pretty annoying to her. She likes watching her favorite network stuffin HD on the new HD set we got ourselves at Xmas, she likes having enough space to record all the stuff the kids like on noggin and Disney,she likes being able to record a bunch of new stuff just to see if she will like it, she likes having an almost unlimited amount of storage space, she likes having the movies ready to playback without having to fool with a DVD player, and she like access to it all from any of ourthree televisions. But there is nothing to like if it doesent work. If it were not for the fact that she still records all her favorites on her M$ Ultimatetv DVR as a backup then things would be ugly. Rather than fold and just go with Dish and a couple of their HD capableDVR's I have decided to try and make my sage install as reliable as a STB.

It seems to me that I could gain some stability by making my server just a server by getting as much non-sage stuff as possible off of it and by not using it for video playback. That would be easy if I had a larger budget or did not need playback of ripped DVD's. I could start this by putting a whole house audio machine together using some spares along with a few new parts. That would move JRMC, Delta control paneland the two Maudio cards out of the sage machine. For the next step I could use a second MVP for playback in my family room. This makes menervous as my current MVP's track record is not great. Telling the wife to unlup it, wait a few minutes, plug it back in and hope that it works wont fly for one second. So how well does the MVP work with V5? This still leaves the problem of DVD playback.I have got to believe
that sage will have this working on the MVP sooner rather than later, so I could limit the server's video playback duties to DVD's via zoomand Mainlobby/DVDLobby. Once DVD playback is available on the MVP then the server would just run sage as a service without the need for anyother software on the machine.

Another option would be to build another full on client pc for the family room. I could then try leaving sage and my whole house audio systemon the same machine. Any thoughts on whether JRMC and Sage along with all that hardware are too much? If so then I guess I could still movethe audio system to another cheapo pc. Obviously this is not the cheapest solution. With that many pc's running in the house I am gonna needa full time time systems admin. to keep it all going.....

Any thoughts, ideas, ramblings or input on making my sage system as solid as possible are welcome.

[mayamaniac]

Good job explaining your situation. I actaully read all that

I don't know about HD tuners since I dont have them. But I have the same intel motherboard, only my intel P4 is 3.2ghz, and also a PVR-500MCE. My system is very stable. The only problem I had was after adding an extra harddrive, my server PSU could not handle the workload, so I had to replace it with a more powerful one.

I have two MVPs and they work mostly well. Once in a while, maybe once a month, it would have problems loading SageTV. It would load the SageTV splash screen and then goes black. Restarting the SageTV service fixes the problem. Overall, I can deal with it as it doesn't happen often.

If all your TVs have PC inputs (DVI, VGA, or Component), then I suggest building a small form factor PC or intel mac mini to use as a SageTV Client.

Stability wise, v5.04 has been good for me. My guess with your stability problem is Java related.

As for the audio stuffs, I'll let someone else answer that as I don't use Jriver or Maudio.

[Jesse]

Hi MM,

Thanks for your input. It is encouraging to here that you are having good success with your mvps.

Given no budget constraints I would certainly do as you suggested and build a full on client pc rather than go for a second mvp. Who knows what formats are coming down the pike and it would allow for the most flexibility.

Another email from sage tech support confirmed my hopes that disabling 3D acceleration in V5 may likely solve my problem with loss of video. This will, of course, limit me to overlay on this machine. I can live with that for a few months until V5.1 arrives. It will also give me a chance to see how my mvp will work with V5. I guess that makes my next step to upgrade again and see how it goes.

Thanks again.

[Jesse]

Hi,

So the need for some improvement got elevated last night when my pc client lost its connection to the sage server. Once again sage (on the server) shut itself down from the system tray.

Keeping in mind MM's above comments about java (and all the other posts on this forum about java issues) I decided to completely uninstall java before upgrading to V5. Before doing so I checked the version which was infact an
older version than is shipped with V5.

V5 and the java version it ships with installed just fine over V4. I went ahead and killed 3D acceleration right away and then tested. TV looked pretty good, even some auto racing I had recorded played back just fine and live tv looked ok too. DVD's were another story...lots of minor stuttering. But so far no black screen/loss of video.

The minimal amount of testing I was able to do with the mvp turned out well. It seemed a little less responsive to the remote but great other than that.

If the loss of video issues dont manifest then I will try using the external player feature in sagemce for DVD's.

Tonight I will check which version of java is on my pc client. I am guessing it is still using whatever shipped with V4.1.6 as opposed to the version that ships with V5. Looks like it might be time for a java update there as well...

[blade]

I must confess I didn't read the entire post so you may already be doing it, but if you can run the service you'll be a lot better off. I run the service on my server and have never had it die on me. If it does ever die it will restart itself.

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by blade

I must confess I didn't read the entire post so you may already be doing it, but if you can run the service you'll be a lot better off. I run the service on my server and have never had it die on me. If it does ever die it will restart itself.

I second that. Once I swiched to using the sagetv service on the server and primarily only accessing material via a client/extender/placeshifter, things became sooooooo stable

[Jesse]

Hi,

So far so good. No problems with V5 thus far. As you folks have suggested I am going to try and move towards not using my server for playback.

More good news: I managed to score a free computer. Nothing too exciting, Athlon XP2000+ processor, 512mb ram, micro atx, XP home, 40gb hdd. This machine should serve quite well as the hub of my music distribution system allowing me to get a good bit of software and hardware off of my sage server. Looks like the only thing I will need is a second drive to hold all the music.

There is a pretty good chance I can get hold of another machine identical to this one. Any reason I could not move the board, processor, etc into my stacker case and use it as my sage server? I could then take the P4 3.0 processor and D865perl mobo I am now using as my server and build a nice client around it.

Things are looking up.

[stevech]

I moved my SageTV from a tower PC to a 2GHz Pentium-M laptop. The laptop has an Svideo out built-in. WAF went up because it's totally silent. The laptop's fan does not come on while it's recording/playing. I have it sitting vertically to improve airflow.

Two USB drives: 160G and 120G. Free space on these is getting less and less because more programs are getting marked "archived" - we might watch again later. I can't rationalize a costly RAID 5 server out in the garage. No backup for these drives worries me. I did buy an on-sale Western Digital 250G hard disk. It was way, way too noisy. I exchanged with with Western Digital's online RMA (wonderful). Same noise. So that drive is on other duties. PC Magazine review said that drive was whisper quiet. Harrump.

Hauppauge USB2 PVR tuner.

WiFi '11g connection to LAN. NIghtly unattended incremental backup using TruImage. Weekly full C: image backup (6GB on WiFi at 2AM). Backups go over WiFi to a drive on a PC in the garage.

I wish I had the guts to redo the menus in SageTV to get rid of all the stuff we never use and reduce the number of button pushes for common actions. I am a software guy, but I fear hosing it up and losing the WAF. I should do this development/test with a client PC version, I suppose. I have a license. Works fine across the WiFi.

[mayamaniac]

Jesse, if that AMD motherboard has VIA chipset, then don't use it as a server. Only Nforce3 or Nforce4 chipsets are acceptable for stability for AMD systems. But overall in my computer hardware experience, intel combos of CPU and motherboards are the most reliable. There is nothing wrong with AMD processors, they are fast as hell, its just the VIA chipset on their motherboard that is flaky.

stevech, RAID 5 should be reliable enough, unless two or more drives fail at once, which is very unlikely. If just one drive fails, it should be abe to rebuild safely once the bad drive is replaced with a working one, no data loss. But yes, RAID is very costly because of expensive RAID controllers and plus you lose a third of your storage space to redundancy.

[Jesse]

Hi MM,

Yeah, turns out the mobo has a via chipset. Thanks for the heads-up. I seem to remember seeing something way back when about them not playing well with sage. I think it should work out fine for my music distribution system as it wont be very taxing and is not nearly as "critical" (how did TV get "critical" ). And besides, for free I dont have much to loose but a little of my time.

Just looking around it seems I can get a mobo with a nvidia chipset for around $75.00. Know anything about this board: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...uctCode=241151

Thanks.

[hemicuda]

Knock-on-wood, but my A7V-600 Asus mobo is working great w/ Sage so far. I'll have to do some searches to see what the common problems are w/ VIA.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by Jesse

It seems to me that I could gain some stability by making my server just a server by getting as much non-sage stuff as possible off of it and by not using it for video playback.

Dedicated server the way to go IMO. I've had a rock solid stable dedicated Sage Server since first building it 4/04. The only times I've had to down it was to upgrade from 4xPVR250 to 3xPVR250 adding 1 PVR 500, then later last year going go 1xPVR250 2xPVR500. And a couple Sage software upgrades along the way but those were just reboots not shutdowns. Until today when I downed it for a failing fan that needed replacing. (One of the 6 drive cage fans was running slow which triggered an annoying non-stop beep-beep-beep you got a problem alarm.) To alleviate any Win leak creep or whatever issues I have it set to auto reboot weekly and it's main 1.5TB storage Raid5 array also weekly scheduled auto defrag. But setup nothing complicated with MVPs etc, all viewing done via PC Clients including a dedicated quiet HTPC main client. Stability couldn't be better.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by Jesse

Just looking around it seems I can get a mobo with a nvidia chipset for around $75.00. Know anything about this board: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...uctCode=241151

Thanks.

I used that board with a sempron 2800+ for about 6 months with no problems at all. I ended up upgrading into a sempron 3100+/Asus K8N-E deluxe combo for an additional PCI slot, digital-audio, and firewire.

[Jesse]

Hi,

I just about have my new freebie machine up and running. Lots of junk had to be removed and some of it did not want to go quietly .

A second freebie may still be in the works, but because of the VIA chipset it would only really yield me a processor and a case. Might still go for it. A second MVP client is also still a possibility.

Slowly but surely working towards making my server just a server...