can dish vip 211s with r5000 mod work on unRAID?

[btrcp2000]

Kicking this around as a summer project, learning about unraid. I am also considering dusting off the old dish boxes and seeing if I still have the driver filed somewhere (or begging around here).

If i were to switch back to dish, would I be able to use these? Are there drivers that would work in an unraid environment?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Kicking this around as a summer project, learning about unraid. I am also considering dusting off the old dish boxes and seeing if I still have the driver filed somewhere (or begging around here).

If i were to switch back to dish, would I be able to use these? Are there drivers that would work in an unraid environment?

No, not directly. nextcomm only ever made the program for windows, so you'd need to run it on a windows machine. You can probably passthrough the USB device to a wnidows VM running on unRAID, but I'm not sure (got rid of my R5000's years ago).

[btrcp2000]

I now have a functional unraid server with a win7 32bit VM, which was chosen because I think that's what I was on the last time the Dish r5000s were in use. I am using the libvirt usb plugin to attach it, which results in an unknown device (within the VM). Manually updating the driver to the x86 one briefly shows "Generic Nextcomm device" in Windows Dev Mgr, but then it disappears. The unknown device does not reappear, so it must be in there somewhere still.

I am hoping to either A) pass the device driver through per Fuzzy's suggestion or B) set it up as a network device by changing the localiport to network IPort in sage properties. But first things first, windows has to see it correctly.

My next step is to disconnect reconnect physically several times to see if it shows up differently. Currently using on onboard USB 2.0 port, but picked up a pcie today. Any other ideas?

EDIT: PLAN C would be to use either a Colossus or HDPVR, but that brings the USBUIRT into the mix. Hoping for the simplicity of the first two options.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

I now have a functional unraid server with a win7 32bit VM, which was chosen because I think that's what I was on the last time the Dish r5000s were in use. I am using the libvirt usb plugin to attach it, which results in an unknown device (within the VM). Manually updating the driver to the x86 one briefly shows "Generic Nextcomm device" in Windows Dev Mgr, but then it disappears. The unknown device does not reappear, so it must be in there somewhere still.

I am hoping to either A) pass the device driver through per Fuzzy's suggestion or B) set it up as a network device by changing the localiport to network IPort in sage properties. But first things first, windows has to see it correctly.

My next step is to disconnect reconnect physically several times to see if it shows up differently. Currently using on onboard USB 2.0 port, but picked up a pcie today. Any other ideas?

EDIT: PLAN C would be to use either a Colossus or HDPVR, but that brings the USBUIRT into the mix. Hoping for the simplicity of the first two options.

I had something similar to this happen with my R5000. The issue was the USB port on the R5000 became loose. I couldn't get it to work right after trying to re-tighten it, so I removed it and soldered on a new one.

[btrcp2000]

getting there. no idea what i did, but at some point the libvirt hotplug plugin stopped reporting the r5000hd as a Cypress SEmiconductor something or other and began calling it an Anchor Chips Python2 WDM Encoder. I attached it, and the VM saw it and installed the driver.

Now my problem is that the r5000 software won't activate with my Sage multi license key. It is still running on my old sage server, so i deactivated that one, but no difference. doesn't seem like its calling home to an activation server, as it immediately rejects it "Key not valid".

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

getting there. no idea what i did, but at some point the libvirt hotplug plugin stopped reporting the r5000hd as a Cypress SEmiconductor something or other and began calling it an Anchor Chips Python2 WDM Encoder. I attached it, and the VM saw it and installed the driver.

Now my problem is that the r5000 software won't activate with my Sage multi license key. It is still running on my old sage server, so i deactivated that one, but no difference. doesn't seem like its calling home to an activation server, as it immediately rejects it "Key not valid".

Could the key be tied to your hardware and you would need to get another key to transfer to new hardware? Something that is impossible right now as I understand it.

[Fuzzy]

There is new network for the r5000, and I do not believe requires a key.

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64094

[btrcp2000]

I saw and downloaded that but figuring out how to adapt it for 2 dish boxes is way beyond me. Happy to read and learn but i dont even know where to begin. If that's easier than what I am attempting I would appreciate any guidance.

Here's some stuff I learned for anyone following behind me:

I have two r5000 dish boxes. The key was looking for the original box from my first purchase. It accepted immediately when I connected the one from the production server, so that mystery is solved. I guess there is a tie to the hardware.

Also figured out that Unraid sees it is a Cypress Semi device when the dish box is powered off (no green light) and the windows VM will install a "genric nextcomm" driver which does nothing and eventually disappears from Dev Mgr altogether. It sees it as the Anchor Chips Pyhton2 WMD device when it is powered on, so there is a sequence to make it work, and the vm will install the correct r5000HD driver.

My next challenges are to figure out how to have unraid allow 2 usb devices from the same manufacturer, saw a video about that. Then to learn about how to have sage treat these as true network encoders (.ie let them sit on the windows VM and have sage come find them via the network as opposed to passing through the device through from the vm directly into the docker). I adjusted the sage properties encoder IP address to the windows VM, and I can get sage to change the channel, but then it complains about wanting to record the .mpgbuf to the E drive, which is on the sageserver. Seems like an easy fix but I need to do some more reading on it. All thoughts welcome

[BobPhoenix]

I don't have an R500HD so I could be wrong.

But with my network encoders on a Windows VM all I did was set them up in the Windows VM first and made sure they worked. Then I edited the Sage property file and changed "enable_encoding_server=true" on the Windows VM and then to make sure I wasn't sharing tuners multiple times I did this: "network_encoder_discovery=false" on the Windows VM. On the linux docker I changed "network_encoder_discovery=true". It looks like this: