Giving up on Sage

[timnelsonic]

About a year ago I instituted an automatic stop/start for the SageTV service at 3 a.m. This takes about 10-15 seconds -- much faster than a full reboot -- and it improved stability immensely. I know this is overkill and shouldn't be needed, but I haven't had a failure since then except in extreme cases (power outage, brain outage, etc.). The WAF increased dramatically so I don't care whether this is really necessary or not. It just works. I'm running on a dedicated Windows XP server with several extenders, HD100 and 200.

BTW, I was about ready to throw in the towel on SageTV a few times but I'm glad I didn't. I love having a central DVR with numerous tuners and no DRM to worry about when copying to my hand-held, etc. It takes a lot of fiddling but it's worth it once it's set up right. My biggest headache is wireless, which is a little finicky with HD, but I'm getting Cat-6 soon so that should cure my remaining rare-but-annoying issues.

[autoboy]

If SageTV ever releases their Server on a Stick (full linux install w/SageTV on bootable USB stick) setup and reliability should go up even more. I'm fighting an unstable HD-PVR that goes down once every two weeks or so, but it is so infrequent that it really doesn't bother me enough to fiddle more with the system.