What OS for server rebuild?

[Motofreak75]

Originally Posted by lpitman

Where is Linux in the Poll Questionaire?

I vote for Linux, its been stable for over a year with v7, I will not (EVER) go back to Windows again.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by lpitman

Where is Linux in the Poll Questionaire?

Considering this is a personal poll for this particular OP's situation, I'm guess it's not an option in the poll, because it's not an option for him.

[nettech_gt]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Considering this is a personal poll for this particular OP's situation, I'm guess it's not an option in the poll, because it's not an option for him.

What he said...

I have nothing against Linux just don't have the time or interest to learn it right now.

[david1234]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Remote Desktop isnt' the best way to manage a sage server - as some of the tasks don't work well in a background RDP session. VNC is far better for sage server remote admin for this reason.

What is it that doesn't work correctly in RDP? I'm using VNC on my server (winXP), but I don't see how it's an improvement.

[Fuzzy]

with RDP, you can't log in to the session that is running at the console. You can only log on to a background session, unless you're using the Remote assistance feature. So, if you need to interact with a session that is currently running locally on the server, then you need to first log in to a background session, then open up task manager, go to the users tab, and log in to the active console session. this will actually disconnect the console session from the console, and let you connect to it. then, when you leave it, the session remains disconnected.

[bastage]

well when mine gets rebuilt I will be going from Win 7 32bit to WHSv1 & will not be upgrading to WHSv2 when it comes out. The drive pooling is the most convient way of backing up inho & when you start working with alot of HDD's the easiest as well. This said I am also not running a raid 5 nor would I consider it for my server. I Dont need the raw speed as with multiple HD feeds my samsung eco drives keep up fine.
So when factoring in the raid 5 I would say windows 7 home premium. & Use VNC to access.

[korben_dallas]

Just migrated to Win 7 x64. There are still a few kinks, but SageTV is working fine. I am running it as a service, after many many years of running the EXE on Win XP.

[davephan]

I plan to rebuild my XP Pro SageTV computer with Windows 7 64-bit. I can't see any reason not to use 64-bit instead of 32-bit. I don't use firewire and all of my capture devices are new enough to work with 64-bit. A later long term project is to build a replacement SageTV computer using Linux, which may be more stable than using Windows. The Linux SageTV system will use separate hardware since it might take a long time to get everything working perfectly. The XP to Windows 7 64-bit rebuild will be done on the same hardware since the SageTV downtime would be about a day.

WHS is a very bad choice for several reasons. WHS is dead-ended by Microsoft. WHS has poor file storage efficiency. The WHS operating system cannot be backed up and recovered with an image. Your disaster recovery plan is then limited to a painful and time consuming scratch rebuild. You would have to install the WHS operating system, SageTV, probably dozens to a hundred accessory programs. These are programs like Comskip, SJQ, Acrobat, etc. SageTV has hundreds of configuration parameters to configure. Other programs also have configuration parameters to set too. An image can capture the entire C drive at a point in time when the system is working perfectly. If you need to recover, it is very quick and easy with an image. WHS is like driving a car through a desert without a spare tire and a broken gas gauge, very risky.

I would recommend an i-7 950 3.06 quad core. They are on sale at Microcenter now for about $200, only in stores, if you have a store near you. They also have a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 X58 ATX Motherboard which is a good choice for SageTV. It has 10 sata drive ports, built-in RAID, 4 PCI-E slots, 2 PCI-E X1 slots, 1-PCI slot, 6 DDR3 memory slots, 1 PATA port, 1 floppy port, 4 USB-2 and 2 USB-3 ports, 1 10/100/1000 NIC. The downsides to this system board are one of the PCI-E X1 slots only works with a very short card or you need to buy a PCI-E X1 extension cable to mount a longer PCI-E X1 card elsewhere in the case to use that PCI-E X1 connection. Another downside is only one PCI slot and only one NIC instead of a dual NIC, but you might not need dual NICs.

An alternative for WHS as a storage server is unRAID. UnRAID is very low maintenance. You can expand it up to 20 data drives plus one parity and one cache drive. You can backup other computers to the unRAID server using a variety of methods. Different drive sizes, types, and speeds can be used, except the parity dive has to be equal to or larger than your largest drive. Be sure to set the jumper on any Advanced Format drives before using them with unRAID. The storage efficiency is very good with unRAID. Your total storage available is equal to the sum of data drives. The WHS storage available is equal to 50% of your drives. I would not recommend trying to run SageTV on the same computer that is being used as file storage. SageTV should be a separate computer that can easily and quickly be recovered with an image. The main downside to unRAID is the slow I/O. It's fast enough to use for your video library and stream HD content, but not fast enough for your recordings. Record the content on your SageTV computer, then move them to your unRAID server's video library folders if you want to keep the files long term.

Multiple Comskip jobs can be run at once with a quad-core. I also recommend using SJQ so that CPU cycles are not wasted processing non-commercial channels like PBS or HBO. You can also off-load the Comskip processing to separate computers. I tried off-loading the Comskip processes to three old clunker computers. The one hour files took all day to process with those old boat anchor computers. I quickly scraped that project. If you use another computer to off-load the Comskip processing, use one fast quad-core with a 3 gig processor.


Dave

[oddjob]

Linux!

[nettech_gt]

Originally Posted by davephan

I would not recommend trying to run SageTV on the same computer that is being used as file storage. SageTV should be a separate computer that can easily and quickly be recovered with an image. The main downside to unRAID is the slow I/O. It's fast enough to use for your video library and stream HD content, but not fast enough for your recordings. Record the content on your SageTV computer, then move them to your unRAID server's video library folders if you want to keep the files long term.


Dave

I'm considering running a FreeNAS sever for my recordings, movies etc. using ZFS. You say the I/O of unRAID is too slow for recordings... What would be considered "acceptable" I/O for recordings?

[Taddeusz]

Granted it's been a while and I forget what version I was using so take this as you will. I was using FreeNAS and switched to using my SageTV server for file serving duties for a number of reasons. One of which was that FreeNAS has comparatively poor network throughput. On FreeNAS I couldn't get anything above about 40MB/s. With Windows XP serving files I regularly get between 60-70MB/s with peaks as high as 110MB/s and constant transfers as high as 90-100MB/s. Never did I get that high with FreeNAS. Not even close. This was using an Intel PCIe gigabit NIC.

If I had to surmise I would say that it's probably FreeBSD that's holding FreeNAS back. FreeBSD has a lack of support so you don't see the high number of quality drivers as you do for other OS's. I've also seen this echoed elsewhere.

[osx-addict]

If your monthly power bill is no issue and you can put it in your garage (due to noise), I've got several quad processor (Xeon's) HP Proliant servers with dual redundant power supplies, battery backed hardware RAID (hot swappable) and all the bells-n-whistles that go with their servers..

The noise is an issue and expect one of these to cost you about $30-40/mo in power as they suck the full 450W 24x7.. They are great machines though and will run anything you throw at them -- windoze, linux, FreeBSD, etc..