LOST Disaster

[brb84]

So tonight it's LOST night. After eating pizza with friends, we all move upstairs and turn on Sage. As usual, it's about 20 minutes after the show started so we can skip through commercials. I play the video and...

...it's totally garbled. Like it plays for a couple seconds then gets all scrambled. I check a different recording on a different station - also screwed! Totally unwatchable. ARGH! Looked at the show Live through the TV's tuner, and everything was fine.

I checked my Sage server...the sage service was eating up like 70% of my CPU, which is very unusual. The machine was not very responsive at all. I waited until after 9:00, hoping the recordings themselves were OK. Rebooted the server.

Once Windows came back up, the Sage service wouldn't start - Logon error! It looks like the Sage user account which runs the service had its password expire. I reset it (this time checking that it would never expire) and started up the service.

Then I checked the recordings again - still garbled.

My worst SageTV fear finally happened - I lost LOST. And in front of an audience at that.

Testing everything now is working just fine. Is it possible that an expired service account password could cause the Sage service to severely flip out (but not totally die)?

Anyway, hopefully this won't happen to you. If you're running XP Pro, don't forget to mark your service account passwords as non-expiring. I'm hoping that's what caused my problem. Although now, I'm sure I'll be super paranoid and frantically testing everything beforehand each week.

[davephan]

It sounds like something more serious is going on. What kind of tuner are you using? Are you using XP Pro?

If that happened to me I would probably try recovering it back in time to an image.

It's annoying when an expected recording fails. It almost makes you want to setup a backup SageTV system just in case, but that would be pretty expensive for those rare cases where the recording failed.

Dave

[Fuzzy]

dave... i think you must earn a nickel or somerthing every time you mention imaging...

[SWKerr]

On the plus side they have been scheduling the previous weeks episode before the new episode so you can get it next week.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

dave... i think you must earn a nickel or somerthing every time you mention imaging...

If you're not prepared to recover, your SageTV computer might be LOST!

Dave

[brb84]

I'm using XP Pro, yes. I have 2 HDHomeruns. I've never run into anything like this before. Today I looked through the event logs but didn't really see anything significant. My main hard drive was badly fragmented, so I'm taking care of that right now.

Anyway, I guess I'll just be sure and test my setup an hour or two before I know I'm really going to need it. I've run cabling to my TV so that if all else fails, I can at least still watch everything live through it while still being able to use my surround sound system. Hopefully it was just a rare glitch.

[jgscott987]

A lot of folks argue that it is unnecessary, but this sounds like a problem that would be avoided by automatically rebooting your server every day. I haven't gotten around to setting mine up this way, but plan to do it every day at 4am.

Any time I've had a problem like this with Sage, it went away when I rebooted the machine. By rebooting every day you may head off these problems, or at least will not lose more than a day's worth of recordings if Sage is malfunctioning.

I don't see any reason NOT to reboot the server daily. It is not any significant extra stress on the PC, and I don't think I've ever had an important show record at 4am.

[brb84]

I suppose if you're ok with your server going down once a day, that makes things simpler. Being in IT myself, I cringe anytime I need to reboot to hope that a problem goes away. I like to actually find the cause of my problem and save rebooting only as a last resort, but I do understand that can create a lot of extra work.

Anyway, I thought I'd post an update on this. After further review, it looks like the locked account was not my main problem. I noticed I was STILL unable to get good recordings this week, but only on HD shows. The non-HD stuff worked fine, but any HD content got totally garbled and full of weird digital noise.

Afraid something was up with my tuners, I installed Sage and the HDHR software on my main PC. I tried recording an HD show, and it worked fine.

That left it to something in my media center. Then I did some research on my latest hard drives. About 4 months ago, I bought 2 1.5TB Western Digital WD15EADS drives. I put them both into one striped volume on the media center, which is running XP Pro. Because that volume is so massive compared to my other 2 drives, Sage has been writing to the new volume constantly because it always has the most space.

After some research on those drives, it looks like I made a huge mistake in buying them. There are many threads of people talking about how bad they are. The main issue falls around transfer rate. The performance of these drives gets so bad, the transfer rate frequently drops to below 2MB/sec. Most of my HD recordings are around 8GB/hour, which would calculate to needing about 2-3MB/sec, which explains why my HD recordings just weren't making it. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be any concrete solution out there. Now I'm trying to about 1TB of video off of them, which is probably going to take me another 2 full days at this ridiculous transfer rate. After that I'm going to try reformatting them as separate volumes with a special jumper in place. If that doesn't help, I'm just replacing them with something different. I don't want to pay $50 to have WD send me 2 more crappy drives, which is apparently what they're doing to everyone else who reports this issue to them.

In short: Do NOT buy the Caviar green EADS drives if you value your HD recordings actually being viewable.

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/...tops/td-p/1217

[Sparhawk6]

Originally Posted by jgscott987

A lot of folks argue that it is unnecessary, but this sounds like a problem that would be avoided by automatically rebooting your server every day. I haven't gotten around to setting mine up this way, but plan to do it every day at 4am.

Any time I've had a problem like this with Sage, it went away when I rebooted the machine. By rebooting every day you may head off these problems, or at least will not lose more than a day's worth of recordings if Sage is malfunctioning.

I don't see any reason NOT to reboot the server daily. It is not any significant extra stress on the PC, and I don't think I've ever had an important show record at 4am.

I agree with you - I have been considering doing an automatic reboot of my SageTV server every morning at the same time (My HD200 sometimes gets sluggish after many days without a server reboot). I don't see any negatives to that. Have you found a simple utility that allows that?

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by brb84

In short: Do NOT buy the Caviar green EADS drives if you value your HD recordings actually being viewable.

Weird, I'm using 2 or the 1TB and 1 of the 1.5TB in 2 of the systems I maintain, (plus 1 of the 1.5TB for bulk storage in my "main" system) and haven't had any problems with them. Moving a lot of data is slow, but nothing like you are seeing. I just copied one to another the other day using plain windows exploder with one on USB, and the transfers were in the 20MB/S range, but that was the USB slowing things down. When all are SATA, I get MUCH better ~50MB/S.

I also have one of these drives in my "main" PC, and yes, it, for some reason I can't explain, is slower than my WD VelociRaptor. But coping files from one to another (aboust 10-20GB when I'm "working"), I always get ~50MB/S transfer rates.

The one problem with the forum you pointed to, is that for some reason, most people without a problem, don't post. Also note, that almost all the problems are with RAID and NAS servers.

[owilsky]

Originally Posted by jgscott987

A lot of folks argue that it is unnecessary, but this sounds like a problem that would be avoided by automatically rebooting your server every day. I haven't gotten around to setting mine up this way, but plan to do it every day at 4am.

Any time I've had a problem like this with Sage, it went away when I rebooted the machine. By rebooting every day you may head off these problems, or at least will not lose more than a day's worth of recordings if Sage is malfunctioning.

I don't see any reason NOT to reboot the server daily. It is not any significant extra stress on the PC, and I don't think I've ever had an important show record at 4am.

Well I am with you, but I have quite a lot of favorites, some conflicts are automatically resolved by recording reruns during the night (this is common here in Germany).
Some years ago I started writing a tool that reboots Windows when nothing is recorded at the moment and in the next 10 minutes. I never finished or tested that tool... guess I should look at it again

[onlydarksets]

Did you verify the problem exists on each of your tuners? I had this issue, and it was the beginning of the end for my HDHR. You can test it out using the HDHR setup software.