My (good) experience rebuilding my server

[reggie14]

Usually I post when something doesn't work. This time I thought I'd post about something that worked pretty well.

I had to rebuild my server (mostly) from scratch. My old motherboard was getting flaky (rebooting was getting awfully risky), and I was worried using Acronis' universal restore feature had a substantial risk of buggy behavior (if it worked at all). So, I decided to reinstall the OS, drivers and apps. The main things I wanted to keep were Sage and Plex. On my server, I use an HDHR, an HDHR Prime, and an HD-PVR+USB-UIRT as sources.

Before tearing down the old server, I saved my Sage directory, comskip directory, and Plex app settings folder (from the user/appdata folder), and I took note of my SageDCT settings.

After putting together the new components, I reinstalled the OS, installed main system drivers, then patches, then Sage-related drivers (i.e., HDHR, HD-PVR, and USB-UIRT). Then I configured my HDHR Prime though the SiliconDust utility (just scanning, mostly), and installed SageDCT.

Next, I installed SageTV, and quickly ran through basic setup. I really didn't want to have to reconfigure Sage, so I renamed the newly-created Sage directory, and dropped my old SageTV directory in its place (as well as putting my comskip directory where it previously was).

I double checked that the SageDCT configuration matched what was already in my old sage.properties file. It did match, so I didn't make any changes to it.

At that point I restarted Sage, and (almost) everything worked just fine! Including all my plugins, fanart, extender settings, etc.

A few little problems remained:

1. HDHR- While the HDHR Prime worked fine right away, the regular HDHR sources needed to be removed, rescanned, and re-added. I had to do this from memory, since the old instructions don't seem to be easily found online anymore.
2. Java- At first I had installed Java 8 on the box, wanting the most recent version due to the horrible Java vulnerabilities floating around. Unfortunately, this didn't work with the mobile web server (and apparently there are some BMT bugs too). I dropped down to Java 7, and saved a copy of the offline installer should I ever need it.
3. Java Heap- I had to try to reset my java heap to 1024 several times before it seemed to stick. At first I just searched through the registry. Then I tried running the old babgvant utility. I'm not sure what fixed it- it's possible I forgot to shut down the Sage server the first time or two.

Plex was simple too. I installed Plex, ran it once, and shut it down. Then I copied over my old Plex settings and restarted it. It seemed to work fine right away.

Reconfiguring Sage is always a pain. The last time I did a complete rebuild it took me the better part of two days to get things working again. Now my system is even more complicated, but I was able to drop my Sage reconfiguration time down to an hour or two. Downloading all the Windows update patches dominated the rebuild time, so between the hardware transplant and the OS install time it still took most of the day.

Now I've got a nice new Sage/Plex server running with a 4790k CPU, 16GB RAM and a 240GB SSD. My old box was Q6600-based from late 2007. Plex transcoding is significantly more responsive on this new box. I'm hoping it will be good for at least 5 years.

[pjpjpjpj]

Well done. I redid my server about a year ago when I finally made the move to an SSD OS drive (with Sage on it). The move was pretty smooth (though I have a much less complicated setup than you, or at least I did then). I've found that as long as you take the time to write down everything you have, make sure you have all license keys available and ready, copy all the important folders/directories to a temporary holding place (so you can replace them on the new), and make sure you get everything installed properly before you start trying to just run with Sage, it isn't as bad as some might think.

I think my biggest hassle was, similar to yours, getting the old HDHR channel lineups all configured.

[Wirenut]

Same here. About a year ago I went ssd and win7. It took a Saturday, but it was worth it. Everything went smoothly and agreed, the HDHR channel lineup was the toughest part. The FireWire tuning took some work too, but I had the old HD mounted to grab all the stuff i needed. The forum helped too.


Today everything runs smooth as silk. Maybe once a week I reboot the the server just for updates or maintenance.

I do a weekly image backup of the whole boot drive, just in case. But really sage has been like an appliance for me.

Wirenut