New build, advice needed

[bastafidli]

Hello,

I took advantage of some deals in my area and I am in process of completely rebuilding my servers. Until now I have been running 32bit CentOS 5.4 with no TV recording and using Sage either via HD100 or via Placeshifters.

I have just finished upgrading my main Sage server to Intel Core i3 so far with 4GB RAM and I am also getting HD HomeRun. I want to ask for advice as far as what OS/version to go with. Could you please comment on what is the current state and what is recommended or what are your preferences as far as 32bit / 64 bit, CentOS/Ubuntu Server (there is an LTS coming this month)/some other distribution.... I am pretty versed with Linux and I am looking for the most stable, easy to setup and maintain platform. Since my server was so stable for last 2+ years I had almost 0 need to change on this server other than periodic updates and therefore I have not been following the latest developments as far as Sage on Linux goes.

This server will be dedicated to Sage and also used as main backup device. Are there any caveats I should be aware of as far as using HD HomeRun under Linux? What is the recommended filesystem / parameters for the recording drive (I will have dedicated 500GB/7200RPM drive just for recordings)? What do I need to do to transfer license from my old server to the new server (other than just copy the installed files)?

Thank you

[RocKKer]

I'll take a stab at this - Currently I'm using ubuntu server 9.10, I started using Ubuntu desktop awhile back and recently changed to server because of some pixelation of OTA TV from HDHR and and hesitations in SageMC GUI on my HD200's. Server's kernel is genned with different kernel parameters that seemed to make a difference for my problems.

Installing the HDHR was so easy! I followed the procedure from SiliconDust for MythTV, works like a charm, absolutely no issues for me.

Swapping to Ubuntu server reduced hesitations and my pixelation problem, but I think what really helped was using IBM's version of Java as noted in this post from drewg. He also changes a line in the startsage script which I did to. So far after a couple days all seems to be running extremely good again.

I also use my Sage server as a backup device and it was the easy to port the RAID array from the old install. I installed the new server OS on a new HDD and mounted the old drive so as I could copy what I needed, (which wasn't much).

I installed Ubuntu server from a USB flashdrive, it went extremely fast I was up and running in under a couple hours. The thing that took the longest was installing ubuntu-desktop, had to so I could install wine for comskip. I have since found there's a way to install wine without a desktop, but didn't find it till after my install, oh well, next time.

I would install some sort of minimal server distro (no-desktop), I was comfortable with Ubuntu that's why I chose it. I installed Ubuntu server 32 bit, it has PAE so it supports addressing more than 4 GB of mem, I have 2GB and it does everything I need. Ubuntu has been rock solid for me (both desktop and server), so I wouldn't hesitate to suggest Ubuntu, although I would suggest server over desktop!

I used xfs file system, it is supposed to be good for huge files, but I think some are using ext3, ext4 with success. I used default xfs parameters when I created the file system.

BTW I have one filesystem on my array for all recording, music, video and picture subdirectories and I used a 128K chunk size.