Migrate to new server

[chip33az]

Hi,

I was thinking of purchasing a new mobo for my server (the current Via Epia seems a little slow). I wanted to know if there were any gotcha's someone has encountered.

I was going to get a 1TB drive and copy the videos, music and TV shows over to it. In addition I was going to copy the SageTV directory as well (for backup).

I am then planning on installing the new mobo and place Ubuntu 8.04.2 (currently running Etch) onto the machine, get it up and running and patched. Install SageTV and then copy the wiz.bin and sage.properties back down. Put the TV shows on the 500GB and leave the movies, music and pictures on the 1TB drive (for the future I'm looking at software RAID for this).

Can anyone think of any issues? Will licensing be an issue?

Thanks for any guidance!

[QueOnda]

If you have a linux Sage tv licence then your ok.

Sagetv Win and linux keys are non-interchangable.

[stuckless]

I just did this myself, switched from a p4 to an amd quad core. I took the drive from my old machine, put it my new machine and rebooted. Ubuntu autodetected the hardware changes and started up fine. Sage came online without an issue.

In my setup, I was going to do a LVM+RAID setup, but in the end, I decided to add my 2 1TB drives (in addition to my boot drive) and use zfs, which gives me the same benefit but with alot less hassle (in my oppinion)

I thought I was going to have a license issue switching to the new hardware, but that didn't happen. I don't know if it's because I re-used my same boot drive??

[davephan]

That computer is pretty slow. I think you'll notice a drastic difference if you go to fast dual or quad. I don't know how will Linux works with 512k RAM, but Windows XP caches to disk continueously and boggs down everything. I recommend going with 2 gigs RAM. My system normally consumes about 900 to 1000 megs RAM all the time.

I tried using Ubuntu on an older computer, similar to your computer, and it ran like a turtle. So, I suspect you'll need more processing power no matter what OS you use.

Dave

[stuckless]

I tried using Ubuntu on an older computer, similar to your computer, and it ran like a turtle.

I'm guessing your are referring to using the GUI, which is slow on older hardware, but if you run a server without the gui, it can be quite fast, and 512mb is adequate... That being said... I agree, and would use at least a dual core machine with 2gig of memory.

[chip33az]

Thanks.

I might just upgrade to Lenny and the place the drive in the new computer and see how it goes. I really don't need the GUI so it may not pay to migrate to Ubuntu right now.

Believe it or not, that little EPIA has been pretty good to me. I used to use it as a MythTV server/frontend without issues. With the built-in MPEG2 decoder it was able to keep pace while watching TV, etc.

The problem is when I record 2 shows at once, I get some problems in both recordings, nothing horrible, just noticeable. I will probably make the EPIA my next IPCOP machine.

Without the GUI it is amazing how little memory/space one needs.

[stuckless]

The primary reason that I upgraded my server is that wanted to be able to do on the fly transcoding of HD shows for the placeshifters/mvps. I also want to add in commercial skip.

[chip33az]

I'm upgrading because I wanted to add in another drive. The EPIA only has 1 IDE connector so last year I bought a SATA II card. However it only had 1 port (I really should think before I buy). I could either buy another card, or get a new mobo.

I will probably get a new drive for storage and then over the next few months purchase a couple of more drives and RAID them, most likely with either XFS or JFS. I even looked at a 3 in 2 drive bay for the machine. I just can't tell if I want to keep this case, or get another case when we move. Right now the server is in the living room with the TV and HD Extender. When we move it will be in another room and noise won't matter.

I haven't tried comm skip before on SageTV. Perhaps I should look at it after I upgrade.

Thanks.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I'm guessing your are referring to using the GUI, which is slow on older hardware, but if you run a server without the gui, it can be quite fast, and 512mb is adequate... That being said... I agree, and would use at least a dual core machine with 2gig of memory.

Yep, that was with the GUI Ubuntu. It was very s-l-o-w! Windows XP ran much faster on the same old computer.

Dave

[kbyrd]

Originally Posted by chip33az

Can anyone think of any issues? Will licensing be an issue?

Thanks for any guidance!

You may have to reactivate the license. Email tech support ahead of time to make sure you're ok. I stuck an already installed drive (Ubuntu, Sage, etc) into a new system and enough had changed that Sage wanted to be reactivated, but the error message wasn't obvious. When I'll get more time, I'll look up the thread where I have the error message and the answer.