Server Died, what next?

[stanger89]

I really thought I'd seen another thread about this recently but I can't find it, it's late, I'm tired, and sorta frustrated, so here goes.

My trusty Sage server has died. Kaput. The lights come on, the fans come on, but it doesn't seem to respond to the power button after it's on, no keyboard response, no video output (swapped in a different "good" video card). It's my trusty GA-MA78GM-S2H with an Athlon X2 2400BE. Obviously it's been running for ages (not quite as long as I've had that CPU but still...). It's randomly shut off a few times in the "recent" past so I'm done with it now.

But now I'm wondering what to do next. Looks like I'm going to miss a few recordings tonight, guess I'll be using the wonders of the internets to catch those. But before I go off to bed tomorrow will be the time to figure out what to do next....

Obviously shortest term I'd like to get something up an running. Probably the best bet is to repurpose my "toy", DQ77KB with i7-3770s and 16GB of RAM, which is currently running OpenELEC though that case doesn't have room for the 2x 1TB Caviar Black recording drives, and the HSF is specific to that case.

Option 2 is to throw Sage on my desktop. Of course this makes things a bit difficult as my old server was looking for recording drives on \\sagetv\sagetv and \\sagetv\sagetv2 and my desktop isn't called that.

Longer term, what do I do, where do I go from there? I suppose logically I can just use the 3770s box indefinitely, don't really need that much power for OpenELEC, heck don't need OE at all....

[IVB]

tough call, hard to decide what you're going to need until you decide what you want.

Thats why I overbuilt the heck out of my server. (At the time). Its typically insulted with how little I throw at it, but I have headroom which means ability to do what I want for the next 5 years until I rebuild again.

[Paul H]

I don't know if this will help but take a look at this thread:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25...te-ma78gm-dead
Check out the last entries.

[mikejaner]

Yeah, what Paul_h suggested is what I was about to say.

Last weekend my openindiana ZFS array went offline. It was also AMD, AM3 based. Lights on the motherboard were on, nobody home. I switched out the power supply and it came on to the post screen but stopped booting after that. I then reseated all of thge cables from the new power supply and it worked!
Anyways don't count the box out yet, try swapping out the power supply first.

Edit (PM me if you wan an AM3 Asus board which is just sitting on a shelf)

[tchapin]

So, you're going to stick with Sage?

I find the Arstechnica box build guides to be pretty good sources of info on how to get the best bang for your buck. They just released the latest guide the other day.

[Skirge01]

Regarding your path issue, I haven't thought through this at all, but wanted to throw it out there for you and others to figure out if it's a possible solution. Could you set up a VM with the correct old paths, install SageTV, then add the new paths where the recordings will now reside?

[KryptoNyte]

When this has happened in the past, I've gone both routes:

1) Build a new machine

2) Test and confirm motherboard failure. Using another computer, get a temp recording solution setup, just something to keep from missing recordings. Then head for Ebay and purchase the exact_same_motherboard from China, swap it in, and the machine keeps humming along - no changes to the software.

[fidget]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Option 2 is to throw Sage on my desktop. Of course this makes things a bit difficult as my old server was looking for recording drives on \\sagetv\sagetv and \\sagetv\sagetv2 and my desktop isn't called that.

I haven't had any problems moving recordings between shares. What usually happens is that the moved recordings get their "Archive" flag set and that is easy to clear using the web interface.

[stanger89]

Well fortunately it was just the PSU. Unfortunately that means I got taken at Staples but oh well, way easier to just swap out a PSU than rebuild an entire server.

Thanks for talking be back to sanity, late on a Saturday night after not really being around for a few days isn't the best time to try and debug things