Question about overall reliability and WAF

[stevech]

Here, a PC in the garage, always on, never used for general purposes, runs Sage (service mode) and a web server and a home automation program (HomeSeer). That PC is an AMD3800, ASUS M2N-MX atx motherboard. Two 500GB SATA drives in RAID1, C: partition for WIn XP and V: partition with 64KB sized blocks for Sage's videos. Two tuners (Hauppauge '150 and Hauppauge USB2 PVR). Hauppauge MVP in livining room. LInked in via a Buffalo WiFi bridge at 54Mbps WiFi = 22Mbps at IP. Sage PC client used rarely. TV out from the garage PC isn't used for viewing videos. Monitor is off mostly.

I never *need* to reboot that PC. I stop/start Sage service every week or two to help with the Heap garbage collection.

The Sage 6 user interface is a struggle on the MVP due to too-small fonts for the small raster size. So my wife has to get up and go near the TV to do some things- she doesn't have the eyesight of a 20-something. I wish Sage would pay attention to this.

But none the less, the WAF is high.

I don't know when we'll make the HD leap. Cost of service is an issue (TimeWarner). And we're not big sports fans and don't watch lots of movies off the cable.

[Tej]

Originally Posted by timnelsonic

... Is Sage rock-solid like a Tivo ...

It can be darn close. We had a Tivo first and still have an original series 1 Tivo running, recording just kids shows. That box has had absolutely no downtime, except for being sent off for an upgrade and repair after the phone modem died from a lightning strike. An amazingly stable device.

In my experience, the combination of a dedicated server, wired LAN and new HD extenders is a major step forward to approaching that level of stability, but is not quite there yet. Most of the problems for me in the past have been related to keeping Windows stable. The dedicated server has pretty much fixed that.

It still does fail to work from time to time, but my "fiddling" is limited to rebooting the server now. Also, the HD extender is still a very new product. I expect that, given Sage's track record, that this will be an extremely stable setup after a few more software upgrades.

As an aside, stability seems to have always been a priority with Sage. Version 1.4 was extremely stable. My personal record was 45 days of straight uptime before something in the Windows networking stack finally snapped, and I had to reboot the computer to get it back on the network.

[Polypro]

Just wanted to chime in here that as long as all your hardware/drivers/OS are installed properly, You can do pretty much what you want with your PC while running Sage. With the hardware/software in my sig, I surf, email, game, workwith audio/video, etc... without any problems. Everything I've got installed seems to get along fine.


P

[John@TunerUK]

I've been using sage for about 4 months now. I have a main machine in my living room which is used for sage and the odd bit of internet browsing, and a client machine upstairs (Dual monitor PC, so I can watch tv whilst I'm working).
Both running Windows XP

In that time I've had to restart the PC.......... Well......... Never

The only time the main machine has been turned off is when I've cleaned dust off the fans, or when I've installed more hardware.

HUGE thumbs up from me

[DFranch]

Originally Posted by dealsdyker

I didn't realize I'd need two machines to have a stable setup) or extenders.

I have only 1 machine. it records to 3 tuners which are PCI cards in the machine and an HDHR which is a network encoder. I've had 5 things recording while watching a HD show and had no problems. I have very few issues. I can't even remember the last time the UI acted up on me. My point is you can have a single machine be quite reliable and do not have to utilize the client server model.

[timnelsonic]

Wow, thanks for all the feedback on my post. I'm now very convinced that Sage is a solid, dependable platform to work with. I'm going to dive back in and start experimenting again. What a terrific forum.

[sandor]

Originally Posted by stevech

Here, a PC in the garage, always on, never used for general purposes, runs Sage

I think this is a *huge* requirement (i added the bold). i think of my sage boxes as being tivos or any other dedicated AV boxes - it has one use, SageTV.

My WAF is very high, and we have been running HD since it came out on SageTV. I don't think i have had an issue that wasn't caused by me, i tinker ...right about when it is running rock solid, i decide to change something "just because".

I also run my main tv off the server, and have a couple of placeshifters/clients on laptops for wifi HD viewing.