V6 won't import mapped network drives

[hjalmar]

I have a ton of video files on a mapped drive, M:\. It is perfectly visible and accessible from Windows. I have set SageTV 6.5.9 to scan it and it has found all the files, and never has had an issue with replaying them.

After updating to 6.6.2, it does not find them anymore.
1. When I try to play them, SageTV says they are not there anymore. The drive is still mapped, and playing the files from Explorer works great.
2. When I refresh the content (SageTV settings...), SageTV finishes in under a second, which very likley means it did not scan any directories.
3. When I removed M: from the list of monitored folders and rescanned, the files disappeared from SageTV. Still there in Explorer of course.
4. When I try to add M: to the list of monitored folders, SageTV can not find it, only local devices, such as hard drives and CD/DVD-roms.

What is wrong? Doesn't SageTV v6.6 recognize mapped netwrk drives anymore? It should according to the manual.

[stanger89]

Did you enable the SageTV service when you installed 6.6?

[hjalmar]

Yes I did. With the same user name/password combo that I'm using to log in to Windows. I mistyped the user name once and the "Service setup" program protested. After spelling it correctly it stopped the protests.

edit: Even if I did mess that up, it should only effect recording (which works fine btw, to a local directory) and not import of existing media files, right?

[hjalmar]

Oh, I also forgot to say that I cannot add the directory as a UNC path either. The SageTV browser finds the workgroup and the server, but no shares on the server. They are of course perfectly visible and accessible from Windows Explorer.

[doc]

You have to use UNC paths when sage is running as a service as it can't see mapped drives.

If the browser doesn't let you add the paths, you may have to stop the service and edit the sage.properties file manually.

[hjalmar]

Thanks doc - adding the UNC paths to the .properties file manually fixed it. I wonder why the browser did not work?

I must not have used the service in my previous installation I guess, even though I could have sworn I did.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by doc

You have to use UNC paths when sage is running as a service as it can't see mapped drives..

is that a Windows flaw (any Service type application is likewise hindered??

[hjalmar]

Originally Posted by stevech

is that a Windows flaw (any Service type application is likewise hindered??

Yes.

[Fuzzy]

Mapping is a user in-session event. The service running, even as a user, is not truly in the same 'session' as the logged in user, therefore the drives are not mapped. The service uses the same credentials as the user, so therefore, can still use UNC paths, just not mapped ones.

UNC really is easier in the end anyways, since it removes the requirement for every client to share the same mapping.

[stevech]

Aren't there UNC issues with sage such as when you need to change the path, and wiz.bin gets irreversibly out of synch?

[gplasky]

No more than a mapped path.

Gerry

[RobJ]

Originally Posted by stevech

Aren't there UNC issues with sage such as when you need to change the path, and wiz.bin gets irreversibly out of synch?

Originally Posted by gplasky

No more than a mapped path.

There is one important difference, a huge and scary one for me, at least with past versions of SageTV. I would hope the situation is better now, although it would still require more extensive recovery steps with UNC paths to media files.

If you have a system failure involving a particular path, it is really easy to fake a mapped path, takes a minute to map to a folder and does not matter what machine it is on, and assuming you have put the media files in that mapped folder or any currently configured media folder, SageTV will see the existence of that mapped drive and the media files there or elsewhere, and will be completely happy.

A UNC path however contains the network name of the machine it is on. If you have a catastrophic failure of that machine, such as I did with the failure of my Windows boot drive, SageTV would not allow you to do *anything* with media files in folders on any drives from that machine (at least in the older versions of SageTV), even if you move the drives and/or files to valid local drives, configured as media folders within SageTV. SageTV *has* to be able to see the existence of that UNC path, at least the first part of it. The only way to 'release' those files was to somehow fake that UNC path, and that may not be feasible, because you may not have an extra machine to temporarily set that network name, and don't have a machine suitable for VM's, or simply don't have the technical knowledge. I was too poor, my machines were too slow, and Windows only, and I had no Linux experience at all or knew about using a Live CD, to find a way to create a temporary machine with the appropriate network name, to fake that UNC path. So hundreds of gigabytes were lost from the recordings library with their EPG data. Perhaps there was a little known or esoteric trick to recovering them, but I spent many many hours trying, unsuccessfully. I still have hundreds of gigabytes of TV recordings stuck in my import library. The EPG data has long been lost though. The old network name was a Dell OEM'd Win98 cryptic thing, and the replacement was Windows XP, and as fragile as Windows is about many things, I was not about to temporarily rename it, especially since it was my SageTV server.

I'm sure that there are better methods now, with the 'Advanced Repair' option probably, to recover files in a situation like the above. But it would still be extra work.

[Taddeusz]

To be a little blunt I don't believe it was a failure of SageTV and the way it handles UNC paths that caused your problem. It was a failure on your part to not change the computer's network name to be something more sensible and to use the same name on the new OS.

When going through a failure such as yours it is trivial to set the "new" computer name to be the same as it was and to set up identical shares with identical permissions just as they were before.

I've gone through something similar to you. In my case I was purposely putting a clean install of XP on my server. All I needed from the old install was my wiz.bin. Set everything up identically. No lost recordings or EPG for those recordings. Everything carried over just as it was before. I had it back up and running within just a couple hours. The only thing that held things up were Windows Updates.

[stanger89]

And you can change PC names all day long and it's not going to bother Windows one bit.