Is there a guide to building a Sage Server?

[wayner]

I am about to build a new Sage server, I have chosen my hardware and had the machine physically assembled at the PC shop. I will do the OS install myself and the OS will be Win7 Pro. The server will be located in my "server room" in my basement and will not be used to watch shows, except for the troubleshooting. Playback will be on my 5 HD-200s or on PCs running Placeshifter.

The server will ultimately be hooked up to 2 HD-PVRs (connected to Rogers Cable SA3250HD boxes with firewire used for channel changes) , a HVR-1850 with one OTA tuner and one s-video tuner connected to a Rogers SA3200 box for SD digital cable (with a USB-UIRT for channel changes) and a HDHR for two additional OTA tuners. I may also connect a PVR-150 to use for a video camera.

Has anyone written a guide on best practices for installing Sage?

1. I assume step 1 is to install the OS.
2. Should I then disable UAC? If I don't doesn't it store the Sage.properties files and other files in a somewhat funky location.
3. Should I use UNC paths for my folders, even if they are on the server PC to facilitate tasks like comskip, etc. from other PCs on my LAN?
4. Anything else I should think about before I start?

[jptheripper]

Since i see you are currently using WHS, so I am assuming using WHS for storage.

1. Create a user that is an administrator on new server synced with user on WHS
2. Disable UAC (its just easier this way)
3. there is no harm in always using UNC
4. remember not all cards (especially 150 i think) work with >4gb ram, so do some research on that.
5. have fun

[wayner]

I need to update my sig - I am not using WHS right now. I have had problems with my Sage system on WHS - I reinstalled the system drive about 14 months ago and it was fine but then I started having problems again about 6 months ago. I still have a fully licensed copy of Sage on WHS (I have two full Sage server licenses) but I don't really use it. And I HATE the fact that you can't quickly restore a WHS server!

My current server is an old Dell 2.8GHz single core running XP Pro. I will replace this machine with totally new hardware and run Win7 Pro. Once that is stable I will rebuild the WHS box and it will be my backup Sage server as well as doing the basic WHS stuff like backing up all clients. I will try to keep all of my files, except perhaps recorded TV, on my Sage server plus my WHS box. That way I have much better redundancies in my system - if my Sage server fails I can just point my clients towards the WHS server and do everything except for Live or Recorded TV.

I almost forgot abou the PVR-150 and 4GB - that caused me lots of consternation a couple of years ago. I may have to buy a 2250.

[tchapin]

Try the Geektonic guide. It seems really complete.

[reggie14]

From what I understand, you shouldn't need to disable UAC anymore to keep the properties and database files in the installation directory, rather than the virtual store. That's new in Sage v7.

But, I'm not sure if there are any other problems with keeping UAC turned on (for instance, with plugins). The safer thing to do, from an operational perspective, is to turn UAC off. But UAC is decent, albeit imperfect, security feature, so I hate to tell people to turn it off.

I think its a good idea to just use UNC paths for everything. That's what I do.

Keep in mind you need to run 32-bit Win7 if you want to use firewire channel changing.

[wayner]

Brent's guides are good but are more for first time users. This is at least my fourth install so I know the basics, but there are other things that you sometimes don't think about up front.

I did buy the 32 bit version of Win7 pro for the firewire reason, and I may also want to use older Hauppauge tuners like a PVR-150.

[davephan]

Using Windows XP or Windows 7 for the SageTV server is a good move if you want to be able to recover the system quickly using an image. I am using Windows XP for the SageTV and recording. A separate unRAID server is used for storing the video library collection.

Dave

[reggie14]

I suspect that migrating your old stuff over to the new server might be trickier than actually setting up the server. Probably less time consuming, but maybe trickier.

It's not quite as simple as just copying your recordings and wiz.bin file over to the new server. You'll need to recreate all your recording drive paths on the new server. So, if you had a d:\recordings1 and a e:\recordings2 on your old server, those paths need to exist on your new server.

However, I also think you should switch to UNC paths. It *won't* work to simply recreate your recordings directories as is, then share d:\recordings1 as \\sageserver\recordings1. Sage will continue seeing your recordings in the old directory, even if that's no longer included as a recording directory in the SageTV configuration. In order for Sage to "find" the recordings in the new directory using UNC paths, it needs to see that they're *not* in the old directory. So, after you add \\sageserver\recordings1 as a recording directory and you copy your files over to it, you'll want to keep an empty d:\recordings1 folder around.

One of these days I think I'd like to get a new Sage server. My X2 3800+ just doesn't have enough power to run the PlayOn transcoder, and it really has to chug away for a long time to run comskip on a HD-PVR recording. But, I'm still using firewire recording, which was a big pain to set up. Maybe if we get some limited cablecard support I'll drop my buggy firewire recording and get an HDHR-Prime instead, and use that opportunity to build a new server.

[wayner]

Thanks for the advice Reggie. I think what I will try to do is first just copy some files from my old server to the new server. If that then looks good I will just move the hard drive from the old server to the new server and set it up as a TV recording folder using UNC paths such as \newserver\TV1\. That way I will never have both "old" and "new" folders simultaneously.