Amahi LHS

Watching the home networking space is interesting. The whole space is exploding, many people approaching it in many different ways.

We hope to have a good approach with the Amahi Linux Home Server. We wanted to recap a bit a few interesting links we have been gathering.

Education on Home Networking

One thing most people realize is that enthusiasts and “DIYers” have an edge: education.
So, for instance, Sony spends some nice effort educating US customers and potential customers through their Backstate101 site. They have a large number of tutorials and courses. Take for instance this excellent online course on advanced home networking. It is particularly thorough and informative. Here are the lessons:

1. Advanced Networking: basic infrastructure, like setting up a client/server configuration (that’s our interest!), wiring (ethernet, power line networking, hubs), sharing printers, etc.
2. Advanced Network Security: protecting your network, firewalls, testing your setup for security, etc.
3. Wireless networking: all about wireless
4. Advanced topics: remote access/VPN, hosting a web server or email server, distributing audio and video, etc.

It covers a whole range of networking topics fairly deeply. Here are other home networking tutorials. They are sprouting everywhere!

Growth!

The projections in the humming home networking space are periodically pouring in. This one from Parks Associates, indicates home networking worldwide will reach 170 million units in 2006.

Home networking penetration worldwide is predicted to increase nearly 50 percent from 2006 to 2008, reaching to almost 170 million units by the end of 2008 from 114 million in 2006

According to Parks Associates’ white paper “Europe: Home Network Update”, service provider-led deployments of residential gateway solutions, particularly in Europe drive the growth of households with data networking solutions for broadband and file sharing. Amid aggressive competition, European broadband providers will have deployed residential gateways to more than 16 million households by the end of 2008, up from 11 million at year-end 2007.

Online Media and Home Networking

Check this one out. A nice fellow got to find out the hard way that apparently Comcast limits monthly downloads at the highest speed to *cough* 384GB *cough*. Not bad. After that, you get some slowdown. For the geeks out there, 384 is, of course, 256 + 128, a nice round number. Clearly, the next slowdowns come at 448GB and then 480GB

In this newsletter

• Great Amahi News
• Rise in Popularity
• New Release
• Finding out What Users Want

Great Amahi News

Time for an Amahi update, packed with news!

With these great news, you’d think we’re onto something!

• Since our last newsletter, our users and installs have more than doubled. Again.
• Our average daily web site traffic has increased more than 5-fold.
• We’ve had a couple of waves of over 500% and 2000% increase in traffic compared to average traffic. Yes, that’s 5-fold and 20-fold over the average, for those like me with rusty math
• Requests to join our beta program have increased dramatically, to the point that we cannot handle them efficiently. We’re very actively working to address this.
• We’re risen significantly in visbility, ranking about number 3 in most major search engines: Google. Yahoo! and Live
• … last, and most importantly, we released our best-ever Amahi Linux Home Server release to date!

Rise in Popularity

I know what you’re thinking. You think we probably got some bit of unexpected help from the perceived competition. That has certainly got us some interested users. However, we’re really not in competition for the same users. We’re complementary, not just in the typical users, but also in technical features.

Nevertheless, we welcome users interested in shaping our view of what a home server should be!

Part of the rising popularity since the last newsletter comes from being referenced in various well known and respected forums like ars technica, engadget, gigaom, clubic, in France, AVForums in the UK, DailyTech, TechWatch in Australia, and others. We have also been featured in popular sites like Newegg, and reviewed in various blogs in the home server space.

Our user mailing list is now gaining traction and we hope to get some rocking developers from it!

Not only that, we have been getting great feedback and even some praise in the form of great testimonials!

We are rotating a few of the testimonials at a time in our web page.

New Release, Fedora 8 Based

On the more concrete news front, we have done a big new release since our last newsletter.

After this release proved to be stable, we have been opening the beta program to more and more enthusiasts. We have more than tripled our user base and got more and more useful feedback than ever.

This release contains stability improvements, it is based on Fedora 8, it features Ruby on Rails 2.0, and it provides a solid base to add more components into the base system, like making it more of a media server, which is what our uses seem to be want the most.

Finding Out What Users Want - Pretty Pictures!

Now for some eye candy.

One of the great challenges we have, being small and community driven, is to understand what you, our users, really want, (not just what you say you want). This helps us prioritize what to work on, as opposed to guess. It’s basic customer satisfaction.

At the moment we are conducting research on what features people are interested in the most. Here is how we’re doing it. We have our list of the major features in the Amahi Linux Home Server home page.

We use heat maps to understand what users like the most, by correlating where visitors look at, in an aggregate manner. Hopefully this is a reliable indicator of user preferences. See the picture below!

In addition, we’re working towards getting feedback forms.

There are quite a few more things going on, as we continue building a team, make new releases and improve the user experience. We’ll keep you updated over time with details, however, that’s all for now!

Hear, hear!

We started posting some testimonials from Amahi Linux Home Server enthusiast users.

Gotta love some of those quotes!

Check out this great testimonial from the amahi-users mailing list. This is a great user testimonial, copied here:

I have posted a couple of questions about things so far that have some
glitches. That is to be expected in a beta, so no worries there. I
thought I would write my overall impression of what I think is a much
needed and very timely project. So far, I like it! I am liking the
overall capability of the Amahi server. This is something that could be
easily built into a Fedora-based Linux system and be an easy server for
someone to set up. Bravo!

I am liking how easy it is to get Samba going. I have never had the
levels of success with Samba that Amahi provides right out of the box.
Both Linux and Windows clients pick up on the shares with ease. This
allows for home and business users to have files and backups available
no matter which computer they are on. In the future this could be
improved by allowing the users to set up additional and protected
shares. Being able to have some folders in the home directory will
allow easy access remotely for ssh and scp users. Encryption would also
be ideal. It would be nice to be able to encrypt files and folders to
protect them from attackers. It would be nice to do this on the fly, so
that the user asks for a file and then has to enter a passphrase to
decrypt it. Just an idea. Failing that another idea is to encrypt
entire drives through the use of truecrypt 5.0. Nice, and protects the
data if the server is physically stolen, but it would be nicer to have
encrypted files decrypted only when needed and asked for by an
authorized user.

Backups are a major item. I back things up far less than I should, and
have been searching for a back up system that I like. I did some betas,
but was never impressed. I like the approach taken in this project.
Just boot up via network, and back up any drive you want. Beautiful
idea, and I hope to get it working soon (can’t mount the iso, and on one
system my keyboard will not work in the linux set up, so I couldn’t
mount it even if I knew what the issue was).

Calendar and wiki functions are great for those organized people, and I
like the recipe app, though I haven’t tried it out. I love to cook, and
also really want an excuse to build a kitchen computer in the future!

Once I have everything up and running to my liking I am going to begin
locking down the server and running some security and penetration tests
on the server. I will give you the results, and if you want I will post
those results in the devel mailing list as well. Security is important
(I know, I am biased, having a masters in Information Assurance).
Hopefully I can give you a heads up to any major issues so you can start
building in a bit of security to your server. Believe me, it will be
much cheaper to build it in now rather than patch it later!

SSH functionality is important to me, and I am not sure how much of it
you all will be planning. Haven’t noticed any real changes as of yet.
You will want to be locking down the sshd_config if you do, and I am
running denyhosts with no ill effect on things as far as I can tell.
You may want to emplore adding that package if you can.

Keep up the good work. I am really enjoying this so far. When this is
all finished you will be making an all day (or multiple day) project
into a 30 minute project. Windows Home Server? Please. Try Amahi, and
have true cross platform functionality!

Love it!

Welcome to part 3 of our series

What I want for a home server

We’re fresh after our recent release of the F8 version of our server platform. After some good hacking, we’re ready to continue with various improvements. There are so many things to do, from installation to apps, that it’s hard to chose!

Our series is inspired by Svein Wisnaes, who wrote and posted his great ideas.

Today, we’re covering monitoring and user control.

Monitoring

He writes about health monitoring of critical components in the network.

There are protocols to monitor hardware today. Especially hard drives that are S.M.A.R.T. enabled. So why not do this centrally? Use the same agent that do the backup control to continually monitor the hard drive, fans, CPU of the pc it is running on and send any critical messages immediately to the server. There you can have a program that send alerts by e-mail, sms, make a call through an IP-Phone and play a recorded message etc. This should not be complicated to set up. And it would be a good thing to send status for each PC on a regular basis so the server builds a statistics that can be reviewed.

Monitoring is something we do, to a basic extent, on our server at the moment. We track manufacturer and temperature status of the drives in the system.

In the PC world, there are some alternatives for monitoring and control. On the server side, there is IPMI, which is really for servers in datacenters more than anything else, and on the desktop side, there is ASF and more recent protocol by Intel called AMT (Active Management Technology). However, these are far from being adopted and will take a while to reach the regular home networks.

In this line, we received a request recently to provide wake-on-LAN capability as a way to control the various machines in the network.

User Management

This is an area that we’re not ready with yet, however, it is very important area, as the ultimate purpose of having a cool home server is to serve the users in the network. Quoting Svein,

This add one more to the given list. I would like to set up both users and groups and have an easy way of adding users to groups. I like using groups instead of user to control access to functions. The server need to be able to run really headless. No monitor, no keyboard and no mouse.

This is spot-on. We’re working to manage users with LDAP, however, that is work in progress …

In the mean time, go check out:

• Our home page
• Our wiki
• Our FAQ
• .. and keep this blog bookmarked!

Granted, it took us a little while to get on to it, but we’re almost there. We’re talking about the Fedora 8 version of the Amahi Linux home server, of course.

We would not have gotten there without the help of members of our beta program.

We would like to single out the contributions of Mitch Davenport, who tirelessly pushed the install process repeatedly, helping in every way and being patient over and over. Our hat goes to Mitch for helping so much!

So, the instructions are up, the repo is also up and running, and so are a couple of issues we found so far, including a bug we found in Fedora 8’s bind implementation. Sign up and let us know how it goes!