Have spare PC looking for suggestions.

[ToxMox]

I have a spare athlon xp 2200+ machine with a gig of ram and all the other needed parts and am trying to think of something useful to do with it. Hopefully Sage related. I already have fully functioning server and client machines and just wondered if anyone had any thoughts.

[stanger89]

Media server!

Throw in a few 400GB HDDs and a nice RAID card, store all your DVDs, music, archived shows on there

[ToxMox]

I was leaning that way as well. I'm thinking of putting it right next to my Sage server and linking the two machines via firewire to get some good thoughput.
I was also toying with making it a video storage for sage recordings and offloading all the comskip detection to this spare box.

[ErsatzTom]

Comskip is what I was going to say. I moved it off to my windows dev box. Keep both the server and the clients as idle as possible. Plus if you do any compression you could do it there as well. *shrug*

Will you get higher throughput on firewire than you would with gigabit ethernet?

t

[ToxMox]

Nah. Firewire 400mbps vs gigabit 1000mbps but I don't have any pci slots left in the Sage server but it does have onboard firewire and I figured 400mbps would be plenty.

[korben_dallas]

How about a backup server? Linux is free, and you can use gzip to compress your files. Setup Sage to shutdown at 3:30am, and then backup your .properties and wiz.xxx files and any other media files.

[Cayars]

ToxMox, go for the ComSkip and Compress options. Soon maybe even automated commercial cutting if your ComSkip sessions are coming out good for you.

Make the box a dedicated MPG processor. BTW, a friend of mine tried the firewire approach but ended up finding that 100MB Ethernet was still faster. Never tried it myself but I think I'd rather have the machine on my "normal" network anyway and not have to deal with special hookups to access the computer remotely.

[ToxMox]

Originally Posted by Cayars

ToxMox, go for the ComSkip and Compress options. Soon maybe even automated commercial cutting if your ComSkip sessions are coming out good for you.

Make the box a dedicated MPG processor. BTW, a friend of mine tried the firewire approach but ended up finding that 100MB Ethernet was still faster. Never tried it myself but I think I'd rather have the machine on my "normal" network anyway and not have to deal with special hookups to access the computer remotely.

When hooked up together on firewire it will act as if on the regular network so I'm cool there. Are you suggesting that I leave my Sage recording storage on the Sage server and let this box do the comskip processing across the firewire/network? or are you saying to make it the Sage recording storage and have the Sage server write the recordings out across the firewire/network instead?

[Cayars]

Either way, see what works best for you. It really depends on the rest of your network. For me I have two extra machines doing the processinf mentioned above across the network and not on the server. I also make use of Pinnacle's ShowCenter so I have this software installed on the "server" and didn't want the server's CPU maxed out all the time.