Thank god for the writer's strike. Is there such a thing as a stable Sage system?

[btrcp2000]

Needing to vent a little here. I have been mucking with some part of my sage system a couple nights a week since building it in June. January has been the roughest of all. In the past three weeks:

Audio has vanished from my music
Analog channel changing kills the sage service
Showanalyzer chokes on certain files, and eventually bogs down the server with crashes
HD extender shuts off randomly or freezes
Cable co threw the 5c switch on me (although I knew this was coming at some point)

This is with 6.3.7 and latest firmware on the extender. We have basically ceased using sage because it is just not reliable until these issues get fixed. If it tries to record off an analog channel, everything quits. I could always remove my analog tuners, I guess, but I'm already down to about a fourth of the intended functionality. If showanalyzer decides it doesn't like a file in the middle of the night, it just crashes over and over again until the server dies, and I don't discover it until I get home that night and it's already missed that day's recordings.

I have filed bug reports with Sage a few days ago, and Jere has been kind enough to work directly with me on Showanalyzer, so I don't know that there's anything I can do but wait. Can somebody tell me there is a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of only occasionally having to deal with an issue??

P.S. Pictures still work. And on my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness. So I got that going for me.

[lobosrul]

I was really really angry with Sage last night when I tried to watch House and got a black picture, until I realized every channel but KASA-DT worked just fine.

Point is, sometimes it seems Sage is always broken when in actuality its working fine. Its a driver issue, decoder problem, 3rd party software crashing, or your local FOX affiliate being down.

[Brent]

Is there such thing as a stable SageTV system?

For me, yes. I've been using SageTV for just over a month and it's every bit as stable as BeyondTV was for me when I used it (and that means it's been very stable by the way). Sounds like you have some frustrating issues though. If theres anything in particular you are looking for in the way of advice, I'm sure other forum members would be happy to put in their two cents.

[sandor]

Originally Posted by Brent

"Is there such thing as a stable SageTV system?"

For me, yes. I've been using SageTV for just over a month and it's every bit as stable as BeyondTV was for me when I used it (and that means it's been very stable by the way). Sounds like you have some frustrating issues though. If theres anything in particular you are looking for in the way of advice, I'm sure other forum members would be happy to put in their two cents.

i have a current uptime of 4 months with sagetv, all HD (ATSC) too. My sage setup has been spot on.

[technazz]

But who is really 'happy' when you have a stable system. If makes you feel not needed. Thats why i'm constantly tweaking..or as my wife bluntly puts it F@*king things up.




Technazz

[bialio]

My server is rock solid. I reboot it every 2 weeks or so just as preventative maintenance.

My theory on getting a good stable system is having a headless server that ONLY does sage. No comskip or anything else runs on my server - not even sage Client. No video drivers or decoders to worry about. It's off in a closet, where it sits there and happily records what it's supposed to and serves up content to the clients/extenders spread through out the house.

btl.

edit : I will be happy when they fix the current HD Extender lockup issue - it's kindof a pain.

[CollinR]

Mine have been very stable, I have one remotely installed at my father's house servering 4 clients for at least a year now. Had an UPS battery go out and he corrupted the database due to contsantly resetting the UPS (stop error tones) not realizing it was pulling the plug on the server. Still it just came up one a blank database and kept chugging along.

[Taddeusz]

Ever since I figured out my server had bad capacitors in it's power supply it's been rock solid. For me it's nice to have something to shove in the corner and not have to deal with that often. I've had a stand-alone Sage server ever since I bought my MVP. Things haven't changed with my HD Extender. I'm thinking of hooking my MVP up in my bedroom to my computer monitor (it has an S-vid input) but I've never really wanted to watch TV in my bedroom. Besides, I'd have to get up to change the input on the monitor.

But yea, if you're going to have problems this is the best time to have it happen since there's barely anything on.

[btrcp2000]

i have no problem with tweaking, as I have learned a lot and it's "me time" in my little computer dungeon under the living room. This is just particularly frustrating because usually with some good hard work and a late night or two I can beat the issues out of it. All of that has been wasted time this month.

My server is now headless (sig is outdated), although I am thinking of re-heading it until the hd extender issues are fixed. Since I can't downgrade the firmware, the extender is all but dead anyway.

I think tonight I will go back to an older version than 637 and start running the client again on the server for now, as . Turns out Showanalyzer was choking on firewire recordings, and I've been 5c'ed anyway (except for ESPNHD, inexplicably), so I guess I'll sacrifice sports and eliminate the fw tuners and sa will never see another firewire file.

I guess I could put sa on another pc, but I'm not sure that would change anything for these issues.

[ybrew]

I try not to muck with my system to much. Been very stable for the past 6 months. An occasional system hang or reboot may be necessary from time to time, but really when I had TiVos, they required reboots occasionally, once a year at least.

I consider sage very stable.

[IVB]

Ditto on the "it'll be stable if you leave it alone once you get it working" bit. IIRC, my record was ~14 months uptime, co-incidentally the same 14 months that I started deploying my home automation setup. I was too busy running wires all over the damn house or hooking up every house subsystem to watch TV, much less muck with Sage.

My differences from you are that:
1) I don't do music through Sage
2) I don't do ShowAnalyzer (is that the comskip thingey? My wife actually likes commercials)
3) I don't yet have an HDExtender
4) I don't watch LiveTV, so I don't do any fast switching.
5) I have a Sage server that is never ever touched, i strictly use clients or MVP to watch TV.

Keep it simple, it works like a champ. I'm sure more complex things also work with high stability, but after 4.5 years, why bother changing...

[Addict]

I've had good stability. Most instability is caused by me trying something new and it breaking. <smile> On occasion I have to reboot my system because it seems to get bogged down, but I attribute that to cheap hardware and relatively complex systems/setup (see my sig). I'm a pretty picky guy, and I've been very happy with how well it works and how stable it is.

Sorry to hear of your troubles...BTW, I use Comskip and Comskip Monitor and it runs flawlessly.

[toricred]

My system has been incredibly stable except for 2 motherboards that burned out thanks to lightning each of the last 2 summers. Since upgrading to my Core 2 Duo, performance has been absolutely phenomonal. I'm always afraid to admit it publicly, but my HD extender has been everything it was designed to be. I still have a few problems with green sparklies at 1080p on HDMI (they go away after the TV has been on for 20 minutes or more) and I'd really like to see them use the USB for an external DVD, but these are just icing on an incredible cake. The best thing lately has been the 6.3.7 release of SageMC. My wife and kids just love it.

[Menehune]

Once I stopped watching TV on my server, it has never gone down except to add additional HDs or for OS updates.

[Taddeusz]

Yea, with the exception of the poor IR receiver positioning I've had next to zero problems with my HD Extender. Of course, I also don't have an HDTV yet so I haven't had to deal with the HDMI issues. Still leaps and bounds better than my MVP and still looks much better than when I had my server directly connected to my computer.

When I read the forums sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that's actually happy with his HD Extender. It's nice to know I'm not the only one.

[btrcp2000]

When it worked I was ecstatic. I had a neighbor comment that it looked almost 3-dimensional on my samsung lnt4661f because it was so sharp.

i know it will work again, but I hate only being able to wait for bug fixes. i don't mind scouring the forums for fixes, but there don't seem to be any.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

When it worked I was ecstatic. I had a neighbor comment that it looked almost 3-dimensional on my samsung lnt4661f because it was so sharp.

i know it will work again, but I hate only being able to wait for bug fixes. i don't mind scouring the forums for fixes, but there don't seem to be any.

I understand, but that's the price one pays for being an early adopter.

[BobPhoenix]

Here's a story for you!

I had no problems with my server but I wanted to upgrade it to a quad core. To handle converting videos without killing the Single Core Pentium I had for a server. So today after copying the videos to the new server I shut down the existing server. Unplugged all the cables and pulled the nVidia DualTV cards. And put them in the new server. Booted it up and got everything up and running just fine. Meanwhile I took the old server upstairs (from the basement) plugged it in and tried to start it and get no video and will not complete post. So spend several hours pulling memory and the rest of the cards from the computer testing a new power supply and still can't get it to work. Yet for the previous 24hrs it was coping my 1TB of recorded videos to new drives in the new server and recording several shows - no problem. (I got a couple of 1TB drives to replace the 1TB raid-5 array in the old server)

Sometimes I hate computers. Now I've got to waist more time testing components to find the problem and it will probably work after finishing the disassembly and re-assembling them again when I find out individually that they are all fine.(The way my luck works - although it could be worse since the new server is working fine).

BobP.

[btrcp2000]

Came home and walked in on my wife...

i can't even bring myself say it....




watching the cable box.

And to make it worse, she was CHANNEL SURFING. And to make it even worse, she was CHANNEL SURFING THE ANALOG LOCALS.

Is there a local support group for those of us with family members who are so cold and callous, maybe like Sage Anon?

Actually, she's been quite a trooper for someone who would prefer a rotary phone.

[blade]

My Sage setup has almost always been rock solid. The few times I've ever had odd behavior I of course blamed Sage only to later figure out that I had some hardware that was dying.