Dedicated Sage Box: Suggestions?

[PeteCress]

My 24-7 PC has bitten the big one one too many times and this time around SageTV was down for 4 days.

There's an awful lot going on in that 24-7 box and I think I want a dedicated Sage box: running only SageTV.... I might even rationalize running Windows XP and not even having any anti-virus if Those Who Know don't shoot down that idea too badly.

The only off-the-wall requirement is that I want 7 TB of storage. Right now that is 3 2TB and 1 3TB drives on my 24-7 box..... In a pinch, I guess we could go with a couple of 4-TB drives or 1 4 an 1 3....

I want it to live headless in the LAN closet, so smaller is better.

No playback, although somebody will be watching movies on it using an HD200 over the WAN - so maybe some transcoding?

Has anybody built up something like this that they like?

[stanger89]

Hardware, not sure about, but everything else sounds like a perfect candidate for unRAID. Might want to check the unRAID forums for build ideas.

And I wouldn't go too small, make sure you leave yourself some options for expansion, that way when you find you really like it, you can add more storage later.

FWIW, mine is complete overkill, it's an Asus motherboard (can't remember the model off hand, but it was one with AMT built in), i7 3770s, 16GB RAM, and a Supermicro SATA card. And it's in a massive case that MaximumPC featured many years ago.

[Telecore]

My headless SageTV server is a micro-atx M/B (core i3) in a Silverstone ML-04B case (with all fans populated) and a couple of Seagate Backup Plus 4TB 2.5" HDD's (removed from their USB enclosure). Also have a WMC headless server in the same case / hard drive as well. Both using a small SSD for the system drive and have no DVD drive. The Antec VSK2000-U3 is another case that I use for small PC builds as well.

[wayner]

I second the unRAID Linux call. I notice that you use lots of HD200s - the biggest benefit of using Linux is that you can set your JVM heap to 2 or 3 GB and run a dozen or more SageTV extenders or clients.

Plus unRAID is well suited to act as a server for other things - I also use it for running the controller software for Ubiquiti Unifi, Plex, AirVideoHD, Apache.

[KeithAbbott]

Windows XP? Really?

[stuckless]

I'll upvote the comments about unRAID, especially if you are wanting to go headlesss (unRAID is managed via it's web ui).

Your existing hardware would likely be fine, for the server. "Intel i7 @3.5GHz, 8 GB RAM, 80-gig SSD drive", but I'd definately add more memory. unRAID if you are just running SageTV would be fine on 8 but you'll be running more than that, even if you think you won't

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

Windows XP? Really?

XP is a great "single purpose" OS for running stuff. I run an XP vm every day for a single piece of software that I need... takes 5 seconds to boot and I give it very little resources/mem. (I also have Windows 7 VMs and they take much longer to boot up and require much more resources)

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by stuckless

XP is a great "single purpose" OS for running stuff. I run an XP vm every day for a single piece of software that I need... takes 5 seconds to boot and I give it very little resources/mem. (I also have Windows 7 VMs and they take much longer to boot up and require much more resources)

Maybe it's just me, but I would not go through the hours of effort to rebuild a server in 2017, to turn around and install a nine-year old OS on it. XP is not even listed as a supported OS for Java 8.

fwiw, I am also in the process of converting over to unRAID. Just waiting for the 2016-2017 television season to come to an end to complete the conversion, since it will likely be a multi-day process.

[dgeezer]

I'll chime in with another vote for unraid.

As an only moderately techie person with a limited amount of time to spend on all this stuff it's been a wonderful change for me. I ran SageTV on windows for years. Now I'm running Unraid on a 3 or 4 year old lenovo core I-3 desktop pc. I pulled the original hdd in case I ever get a new unraid rig and want to restore this to a windows pc. I have 2 6TB drives and a 512gb SSD as a cache drive.

Mine runs SageTV flawlessly. I have Comskip set to run during recordings and it completes in just a few minutes after the recording ends. It runs emby server as a backend for my Kodi boxes as well as Crashplan and a couple other dockers.

There is no remote desktop software to maintain, network shares are easy to set up and always work and updates don't require a reboot. When I had a "headless" windows server I still kept a keyboard and an ancient monitor attached for the occasional direct access that was needed.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by dgeezer

I'll chime in with another vote for unraid.
Mine runs SageTV flawlessly. ..

I'm getting lost.

When I Google UnRaid, it sounds like a storage management system that allows combining many unlike drives into a single storage pool.

But the posts here make it sound like it is also acting as an OS and running SageTV

??

[wayner]

unRAID is a variant of Linux that is essentially a NAS optimized OS that generally runs headless and is controlled via a web UI. It works well creating large storage pools and it facilitates the running of dockers which are containerized applications - and there is a docker for SageTV. It can also act as a host for VMs.

Many/most of the Sage devs appear to be running unRAID - the distribution is maintained by stuckless.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by wayner

...a docker for SageTV.

Is that to say that it would be running a Linux version of Sage? Or is a "Docker" something that runs another OS - in that case, Windows ?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Is that to say that it would be running a Linux version of Sage? Or is a "Docker" something that runs another OS - in that case, Windows ?

unRAID
- NAS (network attached storage) system that happens to run linux and is configured via a rich web ui.
- It allows you to run Docker and Virtual Machines that you setup/configure within the Web UI
- Has a "community" of "Applications" that make it easy to install new features on to the server (like sagetv, plex, emby, etc, etc)

Docker
- Container system (think of a virtual machine -- but lighter on resources)
- for unRAID, you don't need to know about Docker... just that many applications are deployed using this technology. (You just search, install, and it happens to install using Docker, but you don't really care that is is using Docker, just that it happens to work)

SageTV Docker
- SageTV instance (linux) that is deployed as a Docker container.
- In the "unRAID" Community Applications, so you can install it from the unRAID web ui.
- Included out of the box configuration/binaries for comskip (still need to install the comskip plugin)



So when you hear people rave about unRAID... they like the fact that it boots from a single USB and has a great web UI and rich community of ready to run applications (that happen to run on Docker). You easily add/remove applications. When you remove something clean up is tidy (just remove the image and the appdata area)... no files littered around the OS. And as bonus, since unRAID is storage software... you get a top notch NAS solution with fault tolerant data protection with the ability to add new drives (grow storage) very easily.


on my unRAID server I'm running SageTV, OpenDCT, Duplicati, CrushFTP, Plex, Emby, Cloud9, Jenkins, Handbrake, and a Windows 10 VM.

[wayner]

Yes you would be running a specific unRIAD/docker Linux version of SageTV. There is a separate forum for this version that is a sub-forum of the Linux forum and I would guess that there are more people running the unRAID version than the usual version.

You can think of this as having a Virtual Machine dedicated to SageTV - that is not exactly correct, but close enough. Dockers are containers that run within the OS, usually a server OS. Docker applications run on unRAID but they can also be run on other Linux OSes and even on Windows OSes.

If you have a spare PC give unRAID a try as you just download it to a USB stick and the OS runs off the USB stick, although you will need a hard drive or two for the NAS portion, - there is a 30 day free trial and it is pretty cheap to buy a license. It would be easy to hook up one of your HDHR tuners to it. It could be a replacement for your Netgear NAS. You may also be able to run dockers on your Netgear NAS, but I don't know that it could run SageTV

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by stuckless

unRAID
SageTV Docker

You've got me going on UnRaid.

One question - that I could probably answer for myself if I put the time in:
my instance of SageTV-Windows includes a more-or-less-lifetime free subscription to the Zap2It program listing service.

If I go to the UnRaid version of SageTV, will I lose that free subscription and have to sign up as a paying subscriber - or use some other service ?

If so, what do Those Who Know do about program listings/Sage ?

[wayner]

TV listings have always been free for Sage - why were you paying for them (or is that for a previous version of PVR software)? That is, until the SageTV EPG service ends in two months. So everyone is now subscribing to Schedules Direct. But that isn't a Windows/Linux thing - that is the case for everyone on Sage. How have you been loading your EPG data into Sage?

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by wayner

...why were you paying for them..., until the SageTV EPG service ends in two months. So everyone is now subscribing to Schedules Direct. But that isn't a Windows/Linux thing - that is the case for everyone on Sage. How have you been loading your EPG data into Sage?

I have been riding on the freebie - but somewhere got the impression that was only licensed to original buyers of the product from Frey Technologies and not to public domain adopters of Sage.

Wrong, I guess....

But your heads up on it ending in two months is going to save me a bunch of manhours that I would have wasted trying to figure out what happened.

Are there good and not-so-good prices on SchedulesDirect? i.e. is it sold thru retailers?... Or is it only direct from SchedulesDirect and therefore probably only one price?

[wayner]

I think you have to buy through SD for $25 per year and it is fully integrated into SageTV.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by stuckless

unRAID
.

Not turn into a tarbaby on you... but, just off the top of your head, do you know if UnRaid can handle and NTFS-formatted 3 tb drive?

Where I'm going is that I have a bunch of RecordedTV on a 3 tb and a couple of 2 tb NTFS drives and I don't want to lose it all - assuming, of course, that I would be able to use a copy of my current wiz.bin file... Or would I have to start over from scratch? ; (my movies are all on a NAS - presumably transparently accessible by UnRaid/Sage...

[MacDaddy]

One of the great things about unRaid is that it provides a level of fault tolerance to single disk failures for all the data that resides on the protected disks of the server. It uses a technique where there is a parity drive (it has to be larger or equal to the largest sized disk in the array) that can be used to recreate data missing from a single disk failure (and buy you time to replace it). It's not a true RAID system, so the actual data disks are XFS formatted and mountable/accessible in Linux. If you get in a hairy disk loss situation, at least any remaining disks will have accessible data.

I'm sure through the magic of Linux that there is the ability to mount a NTFS drive. It would not be in the protected array. I'm not sure it would be your best bet.

In my recent conversion, I went from a Windows7/Sage7 to a unRaid/Docker/Sage9/OpenDCT environment. I was lucky enough to have the space on my unRaid server to hold my recordings/media until I was confident all was well. Then I took my old drives from the Sage server and repurposed them as extra disks in the array. I was able to copy my wiz.bin over and use my central fanart. I probably could have brought over sage.properties as well, but decided for a clean config with Sage9. You'll find the /appdata share and it will look very familiar and give you everything you had on your old server.

I've used unRaid for over 10 years as my file server. The early iterations were great in the file server world, but extremely spartan to leverage the device for anything else. The last few years the unRaid folk have made a quantum leap forward in their application serving abilities (both with VM and Docker approaches) and improved the user interface significantly.