What hapens when Network drive is turned off?

[tlimon]

I have some burning questions, but first some background:

I have Sage Server running on the media server PC with a hard drive filling up fast. The media server is on 24/7. I have an office computer that has gobs of space. I set up sharing on the office computer and "allow users to change files" I added the \\Office\Shared Video path to the video directories on the sage server. All is working fine so far.

Now the questions:

What happens when I turn off the office computer? Or when I use VPN to log into work? Will Sage drop the unaccessable shows from the "SageTV Recordings" list? Will my WIZ.BIN get corrupted? What is the down side to shutting it down?

My hope is that Sage would be smart enough to redirect the recordings to the media center PC and begin replacing the don't like shows. Is it? Will the WIZ.BIN be affected?

Have any of you tried this scenario with SAGE 2.0? Let me know your experiences.

[coppit]

I've found that Sage will complain with an error if you try to play a program that is on the inaccessible computer. I believe that it will try accessible paths for new recordings. I believe it will just stop recording if you shut down the remote computer in the middle of a program. (You'll get the red "missing parts" bars in your timeline.)

[tlimon]

Do the red "missing parts" bars go away once the network drive becomes available again? Does Sage continue to record on the native drive, or does it error out on all subsequent recordings until the drive becomes available again?

I guess the question is: Are there any "permanent effects" from shutting down the network drive?

[stanger89]

Originally posted by tlimon
What happens when I turn off the office computer? Or when I use VPN to log into work? Will Sage drop the unaccessable shows from the "SageTV Recordings" list?

Possibly, 1.4 would drop them instantly, with 2.0 it's supposed to wait, but I don't know now long.

Will my WIZ.BIN get corrupted?

Shouldn't.

What is the down side to shutting it down?

Not sure what you mean

My hope is that Sage would be smart enough to redirect the recordings to the media center PC and begin replacing the don't like shows. Is it?

It should be, admittedly I've never tried.

Will the WIZ.BIN be affected?

As I said above, it may be, depends on how long the drive is "offline"

You really probably don't want to have Sage store recordings on a drive that's not always "online" it will likely just cause more problems than it solves.

[tlimon]

I ran a little experiment last night:

Sagetv was running on the living room media center but not recording anything. I turned off the office computer at 11:00 pm and back on at 7:00 am.

The result:

Late night recordings continued on the media center pc. No errors, bombs or such.

Recordings scheduled after 7:00 am were stored on the office computer because the networked drive has more space allocated.

SageTV is able to find all recordings no matter when or where they were recorded; The WIZ.BIN file must be intact.

Conclusion:

SageTV is well behaved with network storage even when unavailable for up to 8 hours.

I just wanted to post this to close out the thread in case other have the same question.

[mls]

However, there would be a problem if the networked drive computer gets turned off in the middle of something being recorded. That could leave parts on the network drive and parts on the local SageTV machine drive.

Logically, one would only want SageTV to be recording directly to local drives in the same machine it is running on.

With larger hard drives getting cheaper everyday there really should be no reason to have SageTV store off to a network drive anyway (or at least none that I can think of). That sounds like just asking for a mess of mixed up bits and pieces to figure out how to clean up or view later (even if SageTV might be able to figure some of it out, it would eventually get lost).

[garyc]

I can easily think of good reasons to store on a network drive -- media center PCs tend to be in smaller cases and aren't likely to have large arrays of hard drives. On the other hand, I can think of no reason to turn off the computers with the large storage arrays. If set to for S3 sleep mode, they consume virtually no power (5-10 watts), will not go to sleep if the network is active (i.e. Sage is storing a recording), and, if desired, will wake up if Sage (or some other computer) needs the network resources.

[mls]

Of course you would be talking about a dedicated set up where all the machines would always stay on-line.

If the network storage machine is in a protected area then it might be a good idea. However, for those with wifes, kids, and all their friends messing with the computers it wouldn't work out as well (unless the storage computer was safely hiddend away and locked up somewhere).

[garyc]

Not necessarily a dedicated machine. Assuming either WinXP or Win2000, it could be left at the login screen & set to require a password. This will still service network requests, can still automatically enter S3 sleep state, etc. The computer would be no less secure in this state than when it's turned off - but would still work with Sage.