Problem w/Sage as a Service

[Diego Garcia]

I ran into a bunch of problems upon installing RC18 yesterday (this was my first installation of v7 software). Fortunately most of the problems have a single cause, but it's a problem I hope can be fixed before v7 ships.

Because I had a problem upgrading my HD200 firmware I followed the suggestion in the FAQ for rebooting my Sage server to see if that would solve the problem. I run Sage-as-a-service, and I had configured it to enable service recovery. The service was running before I rebooted the system.

After rebooting, and unbeknown to me, the service did not restart. The Sage UI came up, so I thought everything was fine, but it was using a different configuration than when the service is running. As a result I ran into a large number of issues (e.g., almost all of my recorded TV shows were filed under "Videos", rather than under "TV").

Restarting the service (and restarting the Sage client) "solved" the problem...but doesn't explain why the service didn't start on its own on system reboot. I haven't had a chance to try rebooting the system again to see if the failure to restart the service repeats. I'll do that later today and report back what I find.

Beyond hoping that any "service won't automatically start" problem will be solved, I strongly urge the Sage team to figure out how to make both scenarios -- service running and not -- use the same configuration. It is very confusing to the non-geek user to see software running "as per usual" when in reality it's running a different configuration.

I know, from experience, that this was an issue when you ran Sage v6 under Windows 7 or Vista. At the time this was ascribed to changes in how Microsoft changed disk access control by applications under Vista, forcing Sage in "standalone" mode (i.e., service not running) to use a configuration maintained in the VirtualStore under the C:\Users\... branch, while Sage in "service" mode used a configuration maintained in the C:\Program Files\... branch. I thought I'd read somewhere in the beta release notes that this dichotomy had been resolved in v7, but either I misread that or it's not yet completely fixed.

Whatever the cause, however, it's a significant distraction from using Sage which I hope can be fixed before v7 is officially released. Among many other reasons, it has a very low Wife Appreciation Factor .

[Diego Garcia]

A follow up thought/question: would this problem go away if I had the Sage service run under a "real" user account? In other words, is the disk access control issue the result of the service using, by default, an account with limited disk access rights?

[madpoet]

If you do not use a User account and are trying to access remote file shares, you will not be able to. not sure if that is what you are asking. You must use a user account and be sure that account has rights to the remote shares.

[Diego Garcia]

No, but thanks for mentioning that aspect of deciding what user account to use. I don't store videos on network file shares, all my Sage files are on the same server.

[madpoet]

Ok, sorry then... not sure.

[darcilicious]

I don't recall ever rebooting my Vista HTPC and the SageTV service NOT automatically starting. You may want to poke around the event logs for Windows.

[null_pointer_us]

This happened to me many times in v6.

Sage demanding complete reconfiguration every boot got old real fast.

So I eventually nuked it. Instructions are in last post.

AFAICT, when the app loads before the service, the service quits and leaves the app in standalone mode, where it uses a different settings file. Giving the SageTV app (e.g. the tray icon) a startup delay -- so that it starts *after* the service -- would probably be a decent workaround.

[null_pointer_us]

Originally Posted by Diego Garcia

... I strongly urge the Sage team to figure out how to make both scenarios -- service running and not -- use the same configuration. It is very confusing to the non-geek user to see software running "as per usual" when in reality it's running a different configuration.

I know, from experience, that this was an issue when you ran Sage v6 under Windows 7 or Vista. At the time this was ascribed to changes in how Microsoft changed disk access control by applications under Vista, forcing Sage in "standalone" mode (i.e., service not running) to use a configuration maintained in the VirtualStore under the C:\Users\... branch, while Sage in "service" mode used a configuration maintained in the C:\Program Files\... branch. I thought I'd read somewhere in the beta release notes that this dichotomy had been resolved in v7, but either I misread that or it's not yet completely fixed.

Whatever the cause, however, it's a significant distraction from using Sage which I hope can be fixed before v7 is officially released. Among many other reasons, it has a very low Wife Appreciation Factor .

It's not UAC though I recommend installing SageTV in a non-UAC folder anyway. I don't trust SageTV to be Vista/7 compatible even if they say so.

The problem seems to be:

- You configure SageTV to run as a service.
- You run the SageTV app to watch some TV.
- In the app, you go to settings and configure it to load when Windows starts.
- Now the app will randomly start before the service has finished loading.
- When this happens, server will bail and app will use a different config.
- If the app config is uninitialized, you will be prompted for its settings.
- Oddly, all the server config's values show up as defaults for the app config.

[Diego Garcia]

I think maybe I'll whip up a little Windows app that manually launches the service first and then launches the client app if and only if the service is running. That shouldn't be too hard (famous last words if I've ever heard any ).

Alternatively, maybe I'll port over my "daemon monitor" from my linux box. It periodically checks to see which daemons are running, and sends me a text message if any "required" ones are not.

[null_pointer_us]

Setting startup_delay=30 in Sage.properties might have been an effective workaround.

I just can't remember.