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Hardware upgrade

Show off your HTPC builds, NAS Servers, and any other hardware. Great place to ask for hardware help too.
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klpaint
Posts: 55
Joined: Wed Jan 22, 2020 8:39 am

Hardware upgrade

Post by klpaint » Tue Dec 22, 2020 1:42 pm

I finally broke down and updated my movie server. I was in a strange situation as my server was a very old Vidabox running WHS 2011 (that is not a typo). I have left it alone for years as it worked and it was so slow it was painful to do anything on it. I really like CMC/CCC and am committed to that going forward and CCC needs to run on the server so I bit the bullet and migrated. I expected a nightmare going from 2011 to 2020 but it went better than expected.

I should note that all of my movie drives are in external racks so I did not have to change disks. That was very handy as there is over 40TB's of disk attached to the system.

Due to the way the system sits in my rack, I had to go with a system that lays on it side. I ended up going with a Lenovon M75s-1 with 16GB and a 512GB SSD. As the only thing that runs on it is Windows, MyMovies, and CCC so there really isn't a need for anything crazy. This is especially true considering what I migrated was 8 years old.

In general the migration went better than expected. I installed MyMovies and restored the database from the other machine. One issue I did run into that I didn't think of is that MyMovies uses shared drives and my machine name changed (by design). When I first tried to launch a movie from the client it failed and I couldn't figure out why but Paul reminded me about the names. I can't tell you how thankful I was that MyMovies let's you change one name and it updated all the others. That feature was a huge help. I have run into a couple of issues with old WMA Codecs not being part of the current Windows but found a way to install them.

CMC and CCC migrated very well. I had to update the server name on the CMC client (as expected) and I basically reinstalled CCC on the Server and rebuilt it's database.

I am having an issue burning movies but I think it is an actual hardware issue. I opened a ticket with Lenovo and am waiting to hear back from them. I get strange I/O messages from MyMovies when I try to ingest a movie. I tried running the Lenovo diagnostic tool and it didn't work either which tells me it might be a bad drive. Until I get that piece fixed I can't report on burning but playing seems to work fine.

As I mentioned, this started out as Vidabox. If you are not familiar, they were crazy expensive home systems with servers and clients. They left the market when MicroSoft bailed. With CMC, CCC and MyMovies, I am now able to replicate the Vidabox solution. That was my last piece of their hardware. In case I have not mentioned it, I am a HUGE fan of CMC and CCC. Best customer service on the planet....

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Pauven
Posts: 2777
Joined: Tue Dec 26, 2017 10:28 pm
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA
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Re: Hardware upgrade

Post by Pauven » Tue Dec 22, 2020 2:25 pm

Very cool, thanks so much for sharing!

For those curious what the Lenovo ThinkCentre M75s-1 looks like:

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image.png (398.46 KiB) Viewed 3557 times

That is a lot of hardware in a small form factor! Nice! I'm running my install of My Movies + CCC on a Virtual Machine with 4-cores, 32GB of RAM, and 75G of disk space. That's actually more power than I need, so I'm planning on scaling down to 16G and 2-cores. The 75G of disc space seems just about right, as it's enough to let me keep a 3-4 backups of my My Movies DB, so I would recommend at least that much if not more.

I find it disappointing that they only installed a single slimline drive, sure looks like plenty of room for a Full-height 5.25" Blu-ray drive. Side note here, just a few days ago I ordered a "flashed friendly" slim UHD 4K Blu-ray drive for a new HTPC build, so you do have options if you want to upgrade that drive.

That open slot - can you install a second Blu-ray drive there? I've never seen a gap like that before, but it seems the same size as the optical drive so that would be cool if you could have 2 drives. By the way, if you use foxy directly, you can actually run multiple rips simultaneously - I have 4 drives in my setup and it has dramatically reduced the time I spend copying. But that's all I'll say about that - I'm flirting with my own forum rules saying that much... :?

klpaint wrote: Tue Dec 22, 2020 1:42 pm CCC needs to run on the server
For the benefit of other readers, this isn't technically accurate. CCC runs best when it runs on the same PC that My Movies is running, as it eliminates network traffic from the equation and improves performance. But you can run CCC on a different PC, connecting to My Movies over the network, and there are even valid scenarios for doing this. Also, you don't have to use a "Windows Server" platform for either CCC or My Movies. I run both on a Win10 install.

I don't disagree with your choice at all, in fact I think you chose one of the best solutions. I just want to make sure other users don't think there's a server requirement for running My Movies or CCC.

klpaint wrote: Tue Dec 22, 2020 1:42 pm CMC and CCC migrated very well. I had to update the server name on the CMC client (as expected) and I basically reinstalled CCC on the Server and rebuilt it's database.
Since CCC is brand new, this probably wasn't a big deal, but I do want to comment on your migration here. In CCC's data directory are a couple BIN files, the CCC_MovieDB.bin and CCC_UserDB.bin. You could have copied these over from the old PC to the new PC. In fact, you should have, for this one very important reason:

Both of these BIN files store the User Accounts and their Watched Title History and WatchLists. Perhaps you didn't have much data to lose, being so new on CCC, but if you had changed the Watched status of any movies, or managed your WatchLists, then that data got left behind on the old PC.

It's not too late to recover that data if you need. You could delete both BIN files on the new PC, and copy over both BIN files from the old PC. Then when you fire up CCC, do a Full Export. Of course, if you do this, that means you're abandoning any new Watched History or WatchLists entries that were tracked on your new install. Unfortunately, you can't combine both data sets, so you would have to choose either to recover the old data and discard the new, or discard the old data and start fresh. Hopefully none of this is an issue for you, since you've only been running on CCC for a week or two.

I know all this is a new concept, that CCC has more data in it than just the My Movies data, so I thought it was important that I highlight this consideration.

klpaint wrote: Tue Dec 22, 2020 1:42 pm In case I have not mentioned it, I am a HUGE fan of CMC and CCC. Best customer service on the planet....

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D 8-)
President, Chameleon Consulting LLC
Author, Chameleon MediaCenter

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