Anyone using SageTV with any distro w/ greyhole (drive pooling)

[bastage]

As WHS is now a dead end with no drive extender in Vail I am looking elsewhere for storage solutions. Well I ran across greyhole a while back & have been loosly following its development. With DE gone from WHS it looks like greyhole will be the way I need to start to migrate too.

I Also just tonight found out that sage now can be installed on ubuntu so thats exciting & definitely a step in the right direction. So now I figure that its probably not too awfully difficult to install ubuntu & then add greypool & sagetv to it. But alas I am definitely a linux newb so I have no clue just how hard that would be.

Also is there a way to install SageTV on Fedora based Distro's? Amahi would be very ideal from the work they have already put into it doing alot for making it a media server. It also looks like there may be a future version of Amahi thats debian based so that would make it considerable easier.

Basically I am willing to make the changeover as I am definitely a MS hater (although they were winning me over with WHS & Win7, but then cancelling DE & releasing crap ass windows phone 7 lost me again), but I really don't want to have to buy another sage licence & then not be able to use it.

[stanger89]

If you're going to go through that much trouble, I'd look into getting unRAID, and building a custom Slackware install with unRAID, and try and run Sage on that.

[bcjenkins]

I am running on Fedora 14, no problem. The amahi is using an older base which means older drivers for capture cards. B

[kbyrd]

My problem with unRAID or other linear style collections of disks is speed. I probably obsess about this too much, but I like to be sure I could rip a blu-ray, do a backup, record a stream or two and watch another stream without working about the recording dropping anything.

[ewelin]

did you ever give Amahi a try? I've been looking for an alternative to WHS as well and I went the same path. I found greyhole, then Amahi and I would be tempted to make the switch, but I'd like to know others are using it with sucess. I really don't need it to be my sagetv server, I just need it as a killer file server and windows backup tool.

[jbmia]

And it's working pretty good. Amahi is stable. I have 8 drives with 6.5Tb total across all shares using Greyhole and I've had no issues. Been running it for about 3 months now. Ran Amahi for about 3 months prior to that on a test box.

The really sweet thing about Amahi that I've tested and verified as working, that was really a painful process with WHS, was reinstalling Amahi on a new drive (simulating a failed system drive) and inserting it into the system and verifying that it would see the drives (with a few minor settings in the Greyhole storage pool config panel) and automatically pick them up and just kind of pick up where things left off prior to the (simulated) system drive failure. For this reason, I'm attempting to keep my Amahi system drive as vanilla as possible so theres not alot of app reinstall on system drive replacement. I went through this same experience with WHS and it was an abysmal pain in the ass. I had to pull all my data off my storage drives, add them to the WHS pool one by one and re-copy all my data back to each drive, all the while accounting for file duplication rules. What a mess. Amahi handles this beautifully, so big thumbs up there.

Which brings us to the Linux OEM SageTV server edition. I've been running that about a month now and for the most part it's been just fine. I havent' gone through the process of adding it to a start up script yet, so each time I reboot I need to manually restart the SageTV server. Thankfully, Amahi is very stable. I have had to start the SageTV serverprocess occasionally, and occasionally I've had to use kill command to make that happen. But, the Amahi OS stands stable and doesn't lock up, crash, or appear to become unresponsive like WHS used to occasionally. I've had no issues with streaming 1080p over a Gigabit ethernet system. I am running a fairly new dual core processor and motherboard with 4gb ram as well. I just got the HD300 and it just plain jams!! Very solid and quick. Significant improvement over the HD-200. The ability to decode DTS audio is a major thumbs up over the handicapped HD-200.

I'd played with Linux flavors on and off over the last 10 years, but never really dug to deep. If your not into fiddling a bit, researching issues, and working in a terminal, Linux may not be for you. But, if you're will to expand your knowledge a bit and gain some experience, once you get things dialed in, there's very little maintenance. I've had many little issues that required some research (read Google) and I've never come up short on a solution. Every problem I came across, someone else already had documented a solution on some forum or another.

So, that's my 2 cents. Good luck and don't hesitate to ask for advice.

jbmia

[ewelin]

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'll have to give it a shot. How well do the PC backups work? I have 4 win7 PC/Laptops in the house and plan to add a linux slave in the very near future as I start messing around with asterisk. It'd be great if Amahi would backup the linux box as well.

Do you have any HD-PVRs in your system? How well do they work? Right now SageTV is on my WHS system and I have 2 HD-PVRs are my primary recording devices. Not sure if I'll want to migrate to linux SageTV or keep a windows box to be a sagetv server. I'll need a windows box anyways for my home automation, so I may just keep sage on that... so many choices. LMAO.

And one more question for now on greyhole. Can you configure select shares/folders for duplicate like you can in WHS? I like to have my pictures, mp3s, and files duplicated, but I prefer not to duplicate my movies and tv recordings as they take up a ton of space.

Thanks again for the feedback.

[jbmia]

No HDPVRS currently in my system. I had one running in WHS, but sold it. I found it buggy and unreliable. I exchanged it for the later more stable version and it was the same way.. Coulda been my machine though.. Maybe a problem with the USB port.. Hard to say.. I've heard that HDPVRS are more stable on Linux though, so that's intriguing... But, I'm also holding out for SageDCT and support for the HDHomerun Prime... That's probably a good ways out though.. So, who knows, maybe I'll try one out in Linux soon...

Yes, you can set certain shared folders to duplicate. In fact, not only can you set each to duplicate or not, but you can decide how many duplicates you'd like to keep. Of course, this value is limited by the number of shared physical drives though. So, if I say I want 5 duplicates (excessive!) of my photos share, then it would save a copy on each of 5 different physical drive. Amahi comes with the typical default folders as well (e.g., videos, pictures, etc).

Good Luck!

jbmia

[ewelin]

jbmia, thanks again for the feedback. Now to find some freetime to find myself a new server MB with 8 SATA connectors so I can easily migrate my drives from my existing system.

and yes, 5 copies is excessive, but I could def. see doing 3 copies of photos... really would prefer not to loose those no matter what.