WHS 2011 rollcall and guide

[Beefcake550]

Weekend Ramblings:
Installation of everything went great! I installed the WHS version of SageTV 7.1.9 and it works great. I had the system running reliably with 1 HDPVR for about a day and then did two things.
1) Added a 2nd HDPVR - the one that had been on the test system sitting upstairs
2) Installed Diamond.

I'm not sure, but it seems like 1 of these changes (or neither) has caused SageTV to have a whole bunch of "halt detected in recording" which lead to a "device failure" on one of the HDPVRs. I used to get that once in a while, so I'm just going to watch it for now.

Anyone have problems with Diamond? I like the interface, but it's not worth the headache if there is one.

One thing to note about moving from Drive Extender to separate drives.....when you have a movie collection, it's possible to have a single directory's (one per movie) files spread across several drives. Luckily, I'm handy with Perl and wrote a few scripts that put it all back together again. Still have a little work on this front, but nothing major. Also, comskip files are subject to not being on the same physical drive as the show they are describing. Sage can't handle this, so a little more perl scripting to put the comskip files with the video file was in order.

Overall, a successful weekend....MUCH better than the last time I dealt with this.

Oh, and this morning I ran into a potential problem......I turned on the TV, saw the errors, cleared them off, power cycled the HDPVRs, and finally tried to tune to ESPN and the channel did not change until I did it again. This could end up being a big problem. Trouble is that I tested this very feature on the dang test system multiple times and it was fine. Groan.....

[jorton]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

Anyone have problems with Diamond? I like the interface, but it's not worth the headache if there is one.

Diamond shouldn't cause you any issues, I run 4 HDPVRs and have Diamond on my server, clients and HD300 without issue. I use a nightly restart on the HDPVR's to make sure they don't lock up or get cranky

[Beefcake550]

jorton, How do you go about "restarting" the HDPVRs? I would love to do this on a nightly basis but not sure how to automate it.

[twollman]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

jorton, How do you go about "restarting" the HDPVRs? I would love to do this on a nightly basis but not sure how to automate it.

I restart mine with a timer. I set the timer that the HDPVR is plugged in to to turn off at 5:00 am and on at 5:01 am.

[jorton]

I do the above with a power strip that has a built in timer and also use two scheduled windows events to stop and start the Sagetv service before and after the auto power cycle.

[Jesse]

Hi Beefcake,

How goes it? Have you managed to get sage running smoothly on WHS 2011?

Jesse

[lpitman]

One thing I noticed in my WHS2011 setup is that the HDHR's must be setup to record or spool files from/to a non-pooled local drive, otherwise I got Halt messages. Once configured to non-pooled local drive, I have not had any issues.

FYI...my setup uses an i920 also and in addition to SageTV, I am running HomeSeer and VWS.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by lpitman

One thing I noticed in my WHS2011 setup is that the HDHR's must be setup to record or spool files from/to a non-pooled local drive, otherwise I got Halt messages. Once configured to non-pooled local drive, I have not had any issues.

FYI...my setup uses an i920 also and in addition to SageTV, I am running HomeSeer and VWS.

I'm not sure I understand. WHS 2011 got rid of DE so no pooled drives. So unless you're using another product you can't pool drives in WHS 2011.

Gerry

[Jesse]

Originally Posted by gplasky

I'm not sure I understand. WHS 2011 got rid of DE so no pooled drives. So unless you're using another product you can't pool drives in WHS 2011.

Gerry

You took the words right out of my mouth.

Jesse

[Beefcake550]

So over a month has gone by and all has been going well. I've bought a license for "DriveBender" to get back pooling and couldn't be happier. It works wonderful once you get past the initial "WTF do I do?" type of questions. You basically "convert" the first drive into the pool to a new drive letter of your choosing. Then you "merge" the rest of your drives into the pool (takes about 5 minutes total with 7 drives).

Very Happy...hope this system continues to serve me for a long time to come.

[darcilicious]

That's good to hear about "DriveBender". I'm sure I'll have to make the leap to 2011 eventually...

[eqwalker]

Beefcake550,
Now that you have everything working good, maybe you could type up a revised guide on how to build a WHS2011 server with SageTV? Sometime I plan to build one from scratch and would like to avoid any "gotchas" that you might have already ran into. I have HD Homerun tuners as well with my current system.

[burtonpark]

Originally Posted by eqwalker

Beefcake550,
Now that you have everything working good, maybe you could type up a revised guide on how to build a WHS2011 server with SageTV? Sometime I plan to build one from scratch and would like to avoid any "gotchas" that you might have already ran into. I have HD Homerun tuners as well with my current system.

I'm just building a WHS2011 setup and I'd be interested in that too,
I'm going to be running DVBLink for the tuners, which may cause me some headaches!

[Scriber]

Ive finally migrated Sage to WHS2011 from WHS v1; running non-addin Sage as service. The migration was painless....

The only wrinkle (not major by any means) I'm having is that when i start the UI on the server while the service is running, Sage runs the initial config/setup routine. Ive just cancelled it thus far.

For WHS2011 itself, backing up OSX Lion is hosed despite the Orbital addin and, unlike WHS v1, having to use a single purpose drive for server backup blows....

[burtonpark]

Originally Posted by Scriber

Ive finally migrated Sage to WHS2011 from WHS v1; running non-addin Sage as service. The migration was painless....

The only wrinkle (not major by any means) I'm having is that when i start the UI on the server while the service is running, Sage runs the initial config/setup routine. Ive just cancelled it thus far.

For WHS2011 itself, backing up OSX Lion is hosed despite the Orbital addin and, unlike WHS v1, having to use a single purpose drive for server backup blows....

What Tuners Setup are U using

[Scriber]

Originally Posted by burtonpark

What Tuners Setup are U using

HVR1600

[jamesdisco]

Originally Posted by Scriber

The only wrinkle (not major by any means) I'm having is that when i start the UI on the server while the service is running, Sage runs the initial config/setup routine. Ive just cancelled it thus far.

I've just started to build a new WHS 2011 server and have found the same thing.
Its interesting to see that the old WHS .msi works and gives another license, i may need that in the future.

[Scriber]

Originally Posted by jamesdisco

I've just started to build a new WHS 2011 server and have found the same thing.
Its interesting to see that the old WHS .msi works and gives another license, i may need that in the future.

Just walk through the setup process again and and all is good.

[kevpriest]

Just another voice chiming in: I've been running Sage Server (not WHS version) on my WHS 2011 for several months now. Using some a 1600 and 1400 (I think) Hauppage tuners, with2 clients accessing it. It runs very well, but you can't administer it as an add in, you have to log in via RDP if you want to do anything on the server side that you couldn't do from within the Sage client. Had no issues getting drivers from the Hauppage site, and don't use USB-UIRT on the server (but I do on a 64 bit Win 7 client, and had no issues there). I wish I had a little more horsepower on the server, it's just an old Athlon X2, so when Sage is running at the same time it's doing backups it's very slow. I've also noticed that I don't have something configured right with my commercial detector add-in, because it's just generating 0 bit files for all my OTA recordings, but I don't think that's anything related to it being on WHS 2011.