Amahi reviews: the good, the bad and the ugly! October 20
The last few months have been an interesting time for Amahi.
One of the first popular articles about Amahi was this Linux.com Amahi review. Since then, Amahi has improved dramatically, and several blogs and mutlple magazines have posted hands-on reviews about how simple Amahi has made their home networking (though not all of them have been glowing reviews, which is how Amahi improves!).
We though it was about time we collect some of these reviews!
Do you know any other reviews, articles or post entries? Post them below!
And while you are sharing, how did you find out about Amahi?
First we have a recent post by Luke Addison, who has an in-depth review about his switch from Windows Home Server to Amahi, including screenshots and all. In it, there is a short “things I miss/don’t miss” list comparing them. Guess who wins? 
“It seems to run so much better than Windows Home Server. It must be much lighter on resources.” — www.LukeAddison.com
MaximumPC posted a pretty wide review comparing several Home Networking projects including Amahi. Amahi stood well against competetors like unRAID and FreeNAS.
“This no-fuss home server software is free to operate and only requires that you have a working Fedora 10 operating system prior to installation.” — MaximumPC
The Flotier Designs blog gives a short, but positive, review of Amahi. However, if it were me, I wouldn’t have said that it “isn’t 100% reliable because it’s in Beta.” Many program and sites have been in beta for years and have been very reliable, however. He says,
“I’ve been using Amahi Home Server for a good while now and I have to say, I’d be lost without it.” — BrandonKernell.com
The Bauer-Power Amahi review also gives a short but positive review. He gives kudos to the community in the forum and on the IRC channel for their quick response:
“… the forums and irc channel are very active and responses to any issues are usually made within hours.” — Bauer-power.net
And finally, JetTheN
erd’s Amahi post blog details his personal experience of setting up an Amahi server of his own. Again, while he has some bumps with Fedora 9 (which is now rather dated):
“… Amahi not only gives me a great file server built on a solid foundation in f9 but it has several other cool features that my old FreeNAS server just didn’t have.” — jetthenerd.com
In the last year, Amahi has grown in large part to blogs and articles like these. If you ever wanted to help on an open source project, but wasn’t sure of where to begin, do what these people did and write about it!
You don’t have to win a pulitzer, just get the word out!
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Luke Oct 21
I’d just like to say many thanks for adding my review of Amahi to your blog.
I hope readers will enjoy the piece and try out Amahi.
El Di Pablo Oct 21
Thanks for the link love!
-EDP
kim Mar 6
I love it!
Datahaunt Jan 28
Are you kidding? Amahi better than MS home server? What a joke. I love using Linux or BSD where I can instead of MS products, but it really upsets me to have to waste time with a Linux product to find out that it is SNL software; Not yet ready for prime time.
First of all, Amahi still uses a dated version of Linux; Fedora 12.
Secondly, they Use Fedora 12 as a base. Fedora as far as Linux disrtos goes is crap. I can pick nearly any other common distros to build a 90% system and install the most common of apps and have it work. Not so with Fedora. Even some of the most common apps fail to load on fedora.
Let me give you an example of why Fedora sucks so hard and why Amahi knows this. With nearly any other distro, I can simply add a repository and then load the app and the dependencies. Not so with Fedora. In order to install Amahi, you have to do so during installation. If you try with a 12 distro already installed, it keeps asking over and over again for root credentials due to the untrusted nature of the Amahi repo. Sad to begin with that you have to go through such problems to simply add Amahi to the repo list to begin with.
Again, Fedora sucks.
Even after getting Amahi to load and installing applications, Amahi is not ready to work. It works fine via local access but from a client system, it fails. Amahi uses a “home.com” address. Now they are either too stupid to realize or just too lazy to note that the “Home.com” is owned by a spammer site. Using the IP address would make more sense but Amahi does not resolve using the IP address.
This means I would have to alter my local systems and/or routers to get it to resolved the FQDN to the right local IP address. Again, SNL software.
Then there is the fact that Amahi stubbornly uses an IP address that most routers do not use; the sub 100 non routable 192 address range.
This is a reoccurring reason why so many of the Linux OS distros and related apps are seen as SNL software by so many.
You want to compete with MS products? Then make your software work as well and be as easy to use.
If you cannot, then stop complaining when people reject such poorly written code for something that actually does what it claims it can do without having to edit file after file using sudo.
Ted Trujillo Jun 11
Well I started with WHS and was very disappointed. First off it worked well with the higher end Windows products, like Xp pro, vista pro etc. I had a real nightmare trying to hook up xp home and vista. I understand this is fixed now not sure. Also after a few months WHS kept crashing my system and became a real pain. So I tried Amahi, and fell in love. my Linux boxes and MY MAC computers linked right up and have never failed to this day, my Amahi server has v\been online now for about 6 months without a hiccup. Love the program, did I mention it was FREE? Oh and I can schedule my backups as I want every three days is enough for me. Thanks Amahi for my very useful and bulletproof home media server and back up storage.
cpg Jun 13
@Ted: Thanks for the kudos. We’re working to bring more goodies into the platform! We have started to tack a small fee to some apps to fund Amahi in a way that works with the community.