Giving up: How to achieve these without UNRAID/Linux or Gemstone?

[btrcp2000]

**EDIT Apparently all I had to do was post this and go to bed. Now gemstone/bmt are working. Would love to know what changed, but oh well!**


Since the summer I have been trying to upgrade my 10 year old system to an UNRAID/Gemstone setup, but it's been all downhill and time to throw in the towel due to my requirement for an r5000 tuner, which just won't speak linux. Need to be done with sage tweaking for a while, but am hoping I can at least gain a couple things.

For the foreseeable future, my sage server must live on a win10 VM on the UNRAID server (see sig). Gemstone is not a choice for the below as it just won't settle down, presumably java heap. Hope to at least be able to use the array to record, but it has its moments too. I have been playing with various plugins, but I am just causing further issues and would like some guidance

What combination of plugins would allow the following:

All TV shows imported automatically as TV shows regardless of source or file location

All movies shown as movies regardless of source or location

Must work on miniclients, 200/300 extenders, and windows client

Fanart would be nice

thanks

[fresnoboy]

You can solve your problem pretty easily, at least if you are running everything as VM's on Esxi or the like. Just run the R5000 network tuner on windows as you do now, but Sage on the Linux system. Just access the R5000 tuner as a network tuner. It should work just fine.

thx
mike

[btrcp2000]

Been trying different things for months. No matter what I do, the r5000 software on the windows VM complains it cannot find the path. No combination of forced paths or forward/backward slashes has worked.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by fresnoboy

You can solve your problem pretty easily, at least if you are running everything as VM's on Esxi or the like. Just run the R5000 network tuner on windows as you do now, but Sage on the Linux system. Just access the R5000 tuner as a network tuner. It should work just fine.

thx
mike

This would only work if the R5000 software used the SageTV media server or both servers were Windows and you used a UNC path.

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Been trying different things for months. No matter what I do, the r5000 software on the windows VM complains it cannot find the path. No combination of forced paths or forward/backward slashes has worked.

This is pretty much what I would expect to happen. The code for the R5000 would need to be modified to either translate the path or support the SageTV media server (better option).

[btrcp2000]

According to this thread it is possible using NFS mounts.

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62757

Unfortunately I have not been able to replicate it or reach the original poster. Here's me floundering around on the Unraid forums:

https://forums.lime-technology.com/topic/44104-unassigned-devices-managing-disk-drives-outside-of-the-unraid-array/?do=findComment&comment=597218

I haven't totally given up yet since i found this, but not making much progress either.

[hedly]

Hey, been out of the loop for a while and am considering some upgrades to our systems.

Out of curiosity, what does the unraid server do for you over just having a windows server machine? I mean, your virtualizing Windows on it so it doesn't seem like it's for stability since Windows virtualized should be as stable as it is when it's running natively.

So, why the unraid?

[btrcp2000]

Well, as I mentioned above, I wanted Gemstone for its deep customization. It also seems that android mini clients are the extenders of the future. Those items both require a Java heap level that you can only get via linux.

For years I have had my windows sage server sitting next to another computer that serves as the kitchen desktop, both sucking power but pretty much identical otherwise. I also had a WHS server that was backing up baby pix and all the other desktops. My original goal was one box to rule them all:

1. Sage in docker, fed by r5000 dish boxes from a windows VM
2. UNRAID shares to replace WHS, backed up by crashplan docker
3. Fully virtualized kitchen puter, with its own stubbed usb card and GPU.

That was summer 2017. Only one I have fully accomplished is the elimination of WHS. R5000s will not speak Linux, had to go back to my Colossus 1s and install them on a win VM. They disappear like they always have, requiring nightly VM reboots, which in turn bring down the entire UNRAID server. for reasons no one here or at lime tech unraid forums can explain Tried HDPVR2, but it failed probably due to USB cards that dont like unraid, also keep disappearing. Gave up on Colossus 1 and got two 2's, and a 3rd usb card to try to stub. That seems to have done the trick to at least get me back to SageTV including my premium channels, that I have wasted 8 months of a dish subscription for. All of these problems have taken months to sort out as I also have an outside life.

VM still cannot be rebooted without crashing the entire server. I have swapped hard drives, sata cables, RAM, PSU, everythng but the CPUs and mobo. No one seems to have any clue why this happens. Not sure I would do this again if I knew how miserable this was going to be, but I'm too far down the path now in terms of time and money. I would bet the colossus cards are the problem, but i have no choice about them (cable cards not a solution due to copy flags in my area). I'm going to let it run this way for a while and just hope the VM doesnt need a reboot. That solution wont last forever and eventually im going to lose data due to the constant parity checks that result from this mess. Will likely trash the used Supermicro equipt and start new with Ryzen. Cant say I would recommend this to anyone, but others have had a better experience with similar hardware.

[fresnoboy]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Well, as I mentioned above, I wanted Gemstone for its deep customization. It also seems that android mini clients are the extenders of the future. Those items both require a Java heap level that you can only get via linux.

For years I have had my windows sage server sitting next to another computer that serves as the kitchen desktop, both sucking power but pretty much identical otherwise. I also had a WHS server that was backing up baby pix and all the other desktops. My original goal was one box to rule them all:

1. Sage in docker, fed by r5000 dish boxes from a windows VM
2. UNRAID shares to replace WHS, backed up by crashplan docker
3. Fully virtualized kitchen puter, with its own stubbed usb card and GPU.

That was summer 2017. Only one I have fully accomplished is the elimination of WHS. R5000s will not speak Linux, had to go back to my Colossus 1s and install them on a win VM. They disappear like they always have, requiring nightly VM reboots, which in turn bring down the entire UNRAID server. for reasons no one here or at lime tech unraid forums can explain Tried HDPVR2, but it failed probably due to USB cards that dont like unraid, also keep disappearing. Gave up on Colossus 1 and got two 2's, and a 3rd usb card to try to stub. That seems to have done the trick to at least get me back to SageTV including my premium channels, that I have wasted 8 months of a dish subscription for. All of these problems have taken months to sort out as I also have an outside life.

VM still cannot be rebooted without crashing the entire server. I have swapped hard drives, sata cables, RAM, PSU, everythng but the CPUs and mobo. No one seems to have any clue why this happens. Not sure I would do this again if I knew how miserable this was going to be, but I'm too far down the path now in terms of time and money. I would bet the colossus cards are the problem, but i have no choice about them (cable cards not a solution due to copy flags in my area). I'm going to let it run this way for a while and just hope the VM doesnt need a reboot. That solution wont last forever and eventually im going to lose data due to the constant parity checks that result from this mess. Will likely trash the used Supermicro equipt and start new with Ryzen. Cant say I would recommend this to anyone, but others have had a better experience with similar hardware.

I don't understand your stability problem. I run all my stuff fully virtualized (except for my NAS, which runs FreeNAS on bare metal hardware, and talks to the linux Sage server via NFS mounts).

What hypervisor are you using? USB passthrough works fine on esxi 6.5 for the R5000's talking to windows as a network tuner.

thx
mike

[btrcp2000]

Not sure what I set as the hypervisor and don't to on where to look in the XML while it's running. Will need to crash it to check the VM settings, but I can do that later.

Im very curious about how you have the r5000s configured. I'm assuming there is a windows VM in TR mix somewhere? I was able to get them installed and sage docker could find and tune them as network encoders, but the r5000 software (on this same windows VM) would.complain that it couldn't find the recording path. Do I mind sharing your props file?

[fresnoboy]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Not sure what I set as the hypervisor and don't to on where to look in the XML while it's running. Will need to crash it to check the VM settings, but I can do that later.

Im very curious about how you have the r5000s configured. I'm assuming there is a windows VM in TR mix somewhere? I was able to get them installed and sage docker could find and tune them as network encoders, but the r5000 software (on this same windows VM) would.complain that it couldn't find the recording path. Do I mind sharing your props file?

Sorry, what TR mix do you mean? Are you using VMware ESXi as the hypervisor, or hyper-v, or something else? You aren't running unraid on bare metal are you?

I'm away from my setup, but will try and find the appropriate parts of the files when I get back.

thx
miek

[btrcp2000]

Sorry, lots of typos as I'm on my phone. TR mix was just "the mix".

Never occurred to me that I should run UNRAID any other way. Most around here aren't running it on top of anything else that I know if?

[fresnoboy]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Sorry, lots of typos as I'm on my phone. TR mix was just "the mix".

Never occurred to me that I should run UNRAID any other way. Most around here aren't running it on top of anything else that I know if?

Its fine to run unraid on bare metal , but I thought you said you were running the R5000 on a windows VM on the same hardware. How are you running windows on the same machine?

[btrcp2000]

Win7 is in a VM hosted by UNRAID. The r5000s were installed on the VM. Sage docker found them as network encoders. Now the win7 vm is hosting the 2 Colossus 2 cards as networked encoders

[btrcp2000]

Originally Posted by fresnoboy

I'm away from my setup, but will try and find the appropriate parts of the files when I get back.

thx
miek

When you have a chance I would love to see how you have gotten r5000 working with a linux sage server. Would solve a number of my issues. Thanks for any thoughts you have.