CETON in a WHS

I've read others that have done, but I personally have no experience with WHS. My server is linux based and I have been trying to find a very elaborate way to get it to work.

But anyways, I am sure someone else will point you in the right direction.

The Ceton card wont work in a WHS v1 server due to a lack of drivers but, a Ceton will work just fine in a WHS v2 server. I have 2 in a WHS v2 box that I share over the network to 3 HTPCs.

Just install the drivers, turn on bridging for your Ceton card(s), bridge the Ceton card(s) to your network interface, and last run the network tuning wizard on one of your HTPCs and it will walk you through the rest.

So will it act like the prime or do they need to be assigned?

Ceton is possible on WHS 2011, I believe. Not on v1.

They have to be assigned. I don't know if Ceton has any type of tuner pooling planned.

Ok thats what I thought thanks.

I've read lots of valuable info here in the past but I've never posted anything. I have a question. If i install my Ceton into a WHS 2011 box, with the absence of Media Center, can the Ceton still be used by an xbox directly in the case the other pcs in the house are turned off? Also, will the WHS pc take the role of recording as well or, again, will the pcs have to be on to record scheduled recordings?

The Xbox 360 can only use the Ceton InfiniTV (or for that matter, any tuner) through Windows Media Center - it depends on a PC running WMC.

Thanks. As for the recording, will that also depend on a pc turned on and running W7? Or will the server record on its own drive?

It will also require a PC to be turned on. WHS has no support for Media Center, so this will be true of any brand of tuner you buy

The only way to make a Ceton card work in WHS is to run Windows 7 in a virtual machine and use the network streaming feature of the Ceton card. But then again, you will probably run into issues with getting a driver to work in WHS to begin with.

The Ceton will work fine with WHS2011 as the host machine. The only trouble is that you will not be able to use the Ceton network sharing wizard to make the necessary changes on WHS2011. You can perform the necessary steps manually on WHS2011, however I do not believe that Ceton provides the steps on their website. I was able to get it to work by following the steps in a post to the comments of the following old guide MissingRemote.com published Nov 5, 2010:

http://www.missingremote.com/guide/s...t-htpc-systems

The following is the post on the last page of the comments:

"* Doing this will reset your guide so if you have a lot of modifications be sure to back them up. It is pretty easy to mess this stuff up so please be sure you are comfortable doing this *

On the missingremote guide follow steps 1 - 12.

After that install the ceton drivers on the client computer. Restart.

After you have restarted open up the ceton diagnostic program and then select the devices tab.

Click the clear tuner configuration button.

Once that completes click the discovers tuner button.

You should see your remote tuner pop up in the drop down box on the top of the diagnostic app.

Go into WMC and configure your tuners. Make sure you dont select tuners that are being used by other computers or you will start getting weird tuner conflict errors. There are ways to prevent some of the ceton tuners showing up in WMC but that involves messing with the registry and it isn't really needed. Just make sure you remember what tuners you allocated where.

If you are using more then one ceton then run tuner salad after you clear the tuner configuration and before you rediscover the tuners."

I re-installed windows 7 over the weekend. I have a ceton infinitv 4 tuner in my HTPC. I just moved the card to my WHS 2011 box. Does anybody know if this will really slow down my network access to my WHS 2011 box. Theoretically, wouldn't that be too much network traffic on my whs2011 nic card? What precipitated me to re-install windows 7 was that I was unable to use my TV archive plug-in to my WHS 2011 inside Windows Media Center. I'm hoping this will fix the problem after fussing for hours trying to get it to work with the currently installed version of Windows.

My plan is to have a WHS 2011 host a Ceton Tuner and my HTPC host 4 media extenders. Both the WHS 2011 and the HTPC will both be on 24/7 like they are now. It seems like I would be overstressing the network. I have Cat 5E cable installed everywhere. I assume the tuning adapters have to be connected to the WHS 2011 box. The flow would go. My HTPC makes a request for the tuner for a tv show or recording and the stream would go to my HTPC and then out to an Extender, the recorded tv would then be recorded locally on the HTPC and then Archived back at night to the WHS 2011. My HTPC has always had issues losing the tuner after a few days.

Another alternative would be to a box dedicated only to Ceton Tuner and just use extenders throughout the house and never use my HTPC for watching TV.

Is it worth putting the Ceton on my WHS 2011 box/

How do you like having the Ceton infinitv installed on your WHS 2011 box? Does it slow process in serving because the increase in network traffic? Did you give your Ceton a static IP address?

I have had an infinitv installed in my WHS2011 server for about a year now. No network issues whatsoever. I have had live TV streaming to two different HTPC's at the same time with no issues whatsoever. Shows record locally and are archived overnight.

There seems to be a windows update for the HTPC's (Both windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit) that changes the permissions of the Recorded TV folder, making the TV archive fail. Beware of this. Not hard to fix, though.

I have been running a single infinitv card in my WHS for quite a long time now. I tired to get my second card to work but my cable drop in my server area is just not enough to run the 8 tuners. But on mine when I do the bridge WHS fusses all the time about not being able to connect to the internet. Of course when you check it can connect and even remote access works. I tried adding additional network adapters and bridging to them but I always got the same results. At least for the single card I see no network performance issues.

I installed mine following the instructions from the missing remote webpage. I have had the card in and out many times for different reasons and as long as you follow the guide you should be fine. I have Comcast cable and I do not have to use any tuning adapters.

Can you explain what the permissions changes are needed to get the recorded TV back on the server from the clients? I was hoping to move completely away from the clients and maybe go with the Echo extenders but that looks like a bust for sometime to come if they can ever get them working like they should. I don't want to use the Xbox because I hate the fan noise.

I don't recall exactly what I did, but I noticed that when I opened windows explorer and looked at the Recorded TV folder, I saw that the icon for it had a little lock on it where it hadn't before. I right-clicked on the recorded TV folder and looked at the security tab to see what users had read/write access to it. I have a generic "HTPC-USER" account that I use on all my HTPC's, so I made sure that the HTPC-USER account had read/write permissions, and I also added my own account to it just in case it was required on the server. That did the trick for me. I'll take a closer look at the configuration when I get home tonight and re-post.

This entire thread reaffirms my belief that the Silicon Dust Prime is the best solution for sharing cable card tuners...

I'm sure the Ceton and other solutions can be made to work, but the Prime is so elegant in comparison...

YMMV...

I guess you can say that this entire thread reaffirms that the Prime tuner is more elegant in comparison and on some level I won't disagree. I don't have the Prime but I do run the dual OVA Silicon Dust tuners so I have some experience with them. What I will say is with the Ceton you do get the extra tuner and if being more elegant was in reference to the install, I think most of us are saying that, to the original question, yes the Cetons are very easy to run in WHS server. In WHS server you have the advantage of being in an always on device and other then the coax leads there nothing else to have hanging off the box. My SD tuners have to use another brick on my UPS, they are kind of clunky to position on my server rack and they also have the two coax cables hanging on them. I don't see how you can go wrong with either method. But if you do have a server its another way to get more use from it.

Silicone Dust announcement of DLNA support and how that pans out compared to the Echo which might very well go down as one of the worst first releases of a consumer device ever might just be the deal breaker. I use very low power HTPCs to access the Cetons but if my Sharp could access them using its DLNA support that would sure be sweet.

Finally I want to add and I am sure everyone has there own opinion but I am very disappointed with WHS overall. It nags you to death even if some of its notices such as client updates are good to know I plan on taking mine out of service. I am going to replace it with just a single Win 7 server and put it on Crash Plan for backups. The design decision to only allow WHS to backup to a single 2TB drive makes no sense. The backup drives I have in the server are better used in a USB enclosure where I will use Windows backup and have my critical workstation clients do its own bare metal backups. Sorry for changing the subject but I do think its all relative if you are in the early stages of making a choice.

Completely agree - the 2TB limit is idiotic. The same limit is also there in SBS 2011 Essentials, where it makes even less sense!

+1 for using Crashplan for your "server" backup. Excellent, cost-effective, unlimited backup.

I harbor no such disappointment in my home-built Windows Home Server. Mine is a server first, all other things second. I use it to handle data backups, host my network printer and backup all of my client machines. It's job is to pester you about things that have problems. I have a separate RAID 5 array that contains all my media and a pair of 1 Tb drives (one removable) that contain my OS and backup copies of my data. Most of the mundane tasks are automated. I rarely if ever need to mess with it.

Using it to host the Ceton card has worked out very well for me. I have two tuners assigned to each of two different HTPC's. The best thing is that, since I work nights, I wanted to have a system so well tuned that my wife and young son could use it with little assistance from me. I have achieved that goal.

I cannot and will not recommend cloud computing as a backup solution. With the frequency of data breaches out there, it'd be foolish and irresponsible to trust your data to such services.

Well are application of WHS is the same. Its self built and a server first. I also ran WHS v1, which was easier to manage because of the drive pooling but after having it go south on me a few times that made me transition to the 2011 version. Also from my experience the Ceton tuners are much better performers in an always on box client or server.

My server has been solid and I could stay with it but I disagree about using a cloud backup solution as foolish and irresponsible. Its just off site storage and I have yet to hear of a case where at least for Crash Plan there has been any breach or loss of data. You could wake up any day and face that issue on any computer that's connected. But to each there own. If WHS would let you backup to an 3 or 4TB external drive then that's what I would do. I run Bonkey on the server an open source backup program to backup the music and video files and I let WHS backup itself. the client backups and other non media data. So all my data and backups are to internal drives.

I expect to retire my WHS this weekend. Using the same chassis and I will put in a main board I have with a low power sandy bridge Intel board. Reconnect the drives, put it on Crash Plan and then probably build or purchase a NAS to do local backups of it. The important point here to me is you have to have a backup plan and I think for many people a service like Crash Plan for 50 dollars a year is a good option. By the way have you ever done a client restore from your WHS. I had to talk my brother through one about a year ago. He got through it but it was not easy or logical at all. I much more prefer a clean install and then just reload my apps. Easy for me because I don't install many and have never had a problem getting back into production.

Mine no longer nags me about anything unless it is important. I installed WSUS and configured all my PC's to point to it for updates, so I no longer get the pop-ups there. If it tells me a backup didn't happen, well I want to know that!

The main power for me with WHS is the backup and pc restore feature. There simply is nothing on the market that compares. I keep a base install backup of my HTPC. Anytime I have problems, I just pop the restore disc in and about half an hour later my HTPC is back right were it was when I first had everything installed. When my hard drive went out on my desktop last Spring, no issues, just did a restore from WHS and it was like it had never happened. My only issue is the lack of support for the EUFI motherboards. I don't have any now, but expect I will in the future.

As for not backing up drives larger than 2TB, while I agree its not a good limitation, its not something I'd use anyway outside of my system drive (160GB). FlexRAID for parity backup and crashplan for long term backup is better than wasting money on another 5 2TB drives IMO.

I'm also a big fan of being able to remote into my machines via WHS from outside my network.

WHS is not perfect, but I've yet to find a better solution at a similar price point.

One thing I like about crashplan is that you can specify an encryption that is up to something like 448bit. Yeah, if someone REALLY wants to get at my stuff, they can probably break that, but then they're going to have to sort through thousands of MP3's, photos, etc. before they find something useful, and the useful stuff has encryption on top of that (though certainly if they can get through the crashplan encryption, they can get through it, but the point is it would be a LOT of work for not much pay off).