One of the most frequent issues that we hear about is the need to update an application to a newer version but the data from the old version may be essentially lost, unless you know how to back it up with things like phpMyBackup or phpMyAdmin (which can be error-prone).

No more! Steps have been taken to help protect your data for upgrade. Keeping with our data integrity mantra, we are proud to announce a new feature to Amahi!

We have deployed a new feature called “autobackup” for a selected group of applications.  These apps will automatically back up the existing database when select applications are uninstalled. When you install the new version, your data is imported, automatically!

These apps include some big ones like Drupal, Horde, FengOffice, eyeOS and Gallery. We are working to make this feature available to all apps that have data going forward. Tell us your favorite application you would like to see this feature for and we will do that first.

We hope you enjoy the updated versions for your HDA. It’s your network and Amahi helps you run it easily!

Thank you for your continued support!

The Amahi Team

Amahi will be demonstrating the latest release of the Home Digital Assistant (HDA) home server running on an Intel Atom processor N270 series for embedded computing. The HDA is what Intel calls an “Open Consumer Applications Platform.” A new class of device  integrating a home server with home router functionality. The demonstration will take place in the Intel pavilion from June 2nd to 6th, 2009.

Above: Partial image of Intel Demo Brief with Amahi at Computex 2009

The demonstration will showcase an HDA operating in the booth at Computex as well as VPN access to a remote system (in California). The demo will cover:

• the basic platform functionality for user and share creation, and networking control
• one-click application installation
  • applications demonstrated will include media management, media serving, photo galleries, video surveillance applications and more!
• cross platform support for Linux, Windows and Apple client machines will be highlighted

We have heard from many new users that they had no idea Amahi exists (there has been little if any marketing to date). This show might be what just changes that perception.

This is an exciting time for the community and Amahi – enjoy it!

So, on to the meat of today’s message: thanks to the community (special thanks to damato, rampage and those  members of the tester sub-community) the flow of one-click installable applications available on Amahi continues.

The new applications being announced today (in now particular order) are:

portaNEO	Integrated portal creation and management system
OpenDB	Flexible, home inventory management application
php Address Book	Shared phone and address book
Torrentflux	Popular bit torrent client
WikkaWiki	Standards compliant, lightweight Wiki
VCD-db	DVD/VCD/CDs collection manager

As the number of applications expands on Amahi, the team is feeling the pressure to make it easier for the community to:

1. find the specific application that does exactly what is wanted
2. review applications (there are already multiple applications that do the same/similar “jobs”)
3. propose new applications to add

Be rest assured, we are doing our best to get this done for you. And, to tease those who are actually reading this, there is some exciting news coming in early June. Stay tuned!

Scott Adams recent blog entry addresses his personal need for a home server. Quoting him directly:

If you’re wondering where the next economic boom will come from, I think it will involve a central computer for your home that handles all of your entertainment, home controller, and computing needs.

Before you rush to tell me “That already exists,” and then provide links to things that only do a few functions, let me assure you that it doesn’t exist. But there is no reason to think it won’t be developed in the future.

I came to this conclusion while searching for a home system that would deliver recorded TV shows and music (iTunes) to several rooms in the house, with each room controlling its own content. I was surprised to learn that no such thing exists.

Not surprisingly, as a member of the Amahi community, I take offense at the comment “let me assure you that it does not exist.” It does exist – Amahi is designed with just this objective in mind!

Scott lists his immediate requirements as delivering recorded TV as streaming music (iTunes). Well, those in the community know that MythTV (backend server) for recording and streaming TV is in alpha for one-click deployment on Amahi, and AmahiTunes is already available as a one-click install for streaming music from/to iTunes.

Scott continues in his blog to dream about more advanced home control: lighting, video games, home security, climate control, etc. Well, Amahi already delivers on some of these (eg. video surveillance with ZoneMinder one-click installer), and as an expandable platform it is only a matter of time before the open source community packages more solutions for one-click deployment.

My question for Scott Adams is, “What would Dilbert say about the quality of research Scott did searching for a home server?”

The Amahi team is proud to announce the launch of the Amahi Web App Gallery.

That’s right! Once you have installed Amahi you can simply visit the list of available applications and install them on your home server with a single click!

Watch the screencast of the one-click installer in action with Gallery 2 the after the break below!

Applications being released with this announcement include:

• Gallery2 , popular photo gallery application
• uShare, UPnP and DLNA audio/visual media server
• Jinzora, easy to use media streaming and management solution
• WordPress, the leading blogging application
• MediaWiki, the same Wiki package that got Wikipedia going!
• Transmission, slick bit torrent client
• SABnzbd , simple to use binary news reader
• AjaXplorer, amazing, full featured, browser based, file navigator
• WebVNC, remotely control your server through a browser
• and more … with many others coming soon!

Packaging applications for one-click install is pretty simple. Indeed, one Linux n00b in the community (with some help in IRC channel) packaged the Jinzora media server!

If you have a favourite application you’d like to make available through one-click install see our how to contribute an application page.

Many many thanks to our great community for helping Amahi get to this important stage!

And now, back to Star Wars analogies – the Rebels have more applications in our gallery than the Empire. Let’s work to keep it that way!

—
Here is the screencast (it’s wider to show more detail, so it covers some part of the sidebar):

The installation went extremely smoothly – including the drivers for my old Nvidia graphics card and my HP4600 scanner. After starting the browser (setting my search providers, turning off a whole lot of IE8 add-ins, etc) I tried accessing my Amahi home server. There wasn’t a hitch.

Accessing the Amahi shares is way faster than on XP, let alone Vista. The summary: Amahi works well with Windows 7 (though I still have to test the Amahi VPN from a Windows 7 client).

The IRC channel has been busy (too busy at some times). The Amahi users mailing list is getting used to answer similar questions repeatedly. In both these areas we have also found many discussions are recurring – the sort of issues that are well suited to be answered/supported in a forum.

After this “indirect demand” and requests from community members, we have finally established some forums for the Amahi home server. It may take a little time for the community to populate the forums – but we’re off to a good start!

The forums are located at

http://forums.amahi.org

The forums are single sign-on with the mains Amahi home server site.

• New Amahi Web Site
• Platform Improvemens
• News on Applications

New Amahi Web Site

In this newsletter, we’re happy to announce the launch of our fresh new web site!

http://www.amahi.org

As our user base expands rapidly to several hundred existing users and into the thousands, the web site has been enhanced for a better user experience and to help existing as well as prospective users quickly answer questions about Amahi. Here are some of the new features:

• Very handy custom search engine at the top to search for Amahi-only topics in the wiki, FAQ, blog and more, powered by Google
• New, two-level, menu structure, with easier navigation across the entire site
• Revamped features page, with a new features gallery, new technology overview and community sections
• New wizard to configure your own HDA(s) within seconds, and most importantly, without sending emails. How’s that for instant gratification!
• An area for latest news in the front page

We’re very excited about this new web site, as it provides us a way to start adding cool new features that our users want and we hope all users will find useful!

A number of people provided great help and feedback to get this new web site up and running, including Gerald, who did most of the work to get it going, Ash, Greg, Guy, Luke, Mayte, and a few others!

Many thanks to everyone!!

We continue to improve in the rankings for our area and keep on increasing our daily visitor traffic, which keeps driving new user adoption every day. We have great feedback all the time!

Platform Improvements

Amahi is based on Linux, and it provides a platform on which rich web applications can be deployed.

This platform has been improved tremendously in terms of performance, stability and features in recent times.

We are actively working on the API and recruiting developers to develop more applications. We have a theme engine, and we now have one theme deployed and two others in the making that fully utilize it!

The new theme, conceived by a designer, Alvin Lai, and implemented by cooperation of several Amahi enthusiasts can be seen in this link.

News on Applications

As most of you know, we believe applications are the cornerstone of the Amahi Linux Home Serever.

There are a few applications available, some of them demo apps designed to showcase what the platform can do and some of them already very useful.

The one application that has improved a lot is “slideshow”. This application now advertises Media RSS feeds along with the picture pages. Thanks to that, one can use the amazing browser plug-in called PicLens to see all your pictures in a truly amazing way.

PicLens is a browser plugin that lets you see your pictures in a 3-dimensional immersive “wall” that you can navigate with amazing ease. In fact it’s so immersive, some people get dizzy while browsing their picture collection!

In our family we found we have (somehow) accumulated over 10 _thousand_ pictures over the years. We had no idea we had so many. With PicLens, we were able to fly through all the pictures and enjoy them in a way we had not experienced before, not even with desktop apps!

PicLens can be used to see Flickr albums, Google images, YouTube videos and a host of other sites with the same experience!

More to Come

We have several other apps that have improved over time and have new features coming, one new theme coming this week (maybe more), and many other news in the pipeline …

We’d like to give thanks to our enthusiast users, who keep us going, with ideas, patches, themes, and some bits of patience as the platform comes together!

Lots of new things in the horizon for Amahi! You can see all that we have been up to in our blog. We’ll keep you posted of future news there also!

This new web site (small screenshot below) features the following juicy new enhancements:

• Very handy custom search engine at the top to search for Amahi-only topics in the wiki, FAQ, blog and more, powered by Google
• New, two-level, menu structure, with easier navigation across the entire site
• Revamped features page, with a new features gallery
• New technology overview section with a brief overview of the technology in this Linux-based home server, how to get the code, etc.
• New wizard to configure your own HDA(s) within seconds, and most importantly, without sending emails. How’s that for instant gratification! This will cut installation time by at least a few minutes
• New budding section on community, how to get involved, credits, and a bit about us.
• An area for news in the front page, and a whole easy to search news area
• … and and nice little footer with some handy links to this blog, the wiki, the FAQ and the rest of the standard stuff you see on most web sites

We’re very excited about this new web site, as it provides us a way to start adding new features that we hope you find useful!

A number of people provided great help and feedback to get this new web site up and running, including Gerald, who did most of the work to get it going!, Ash, Guy, Luke, Mayte, Greg, and a few others!

Many Thanks!!

Click on this mini screenshot and it will take you there!

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

• 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!

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!

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!

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!

What I want for a home server

In part 1, we covered the related topic of RAID. Let’s go on to file systems first.

File system

Here is what Svein points out:

Based on maximum security, there should go a lot of thought into what file system that should be used for the data drives. FAT32 would be a good candidate if it had been a bit more robust and allowed for bigger file sizes. But with a maximum of 2GB files, it is totally out of the question since many people would like to store backups of DVD’s on a server like this. A good solution might be to to use ext-2 or ext-3 and provide Windows and OSX drivers to be able to read the drives if there should be a major crisis.

While we do not yet support these on the Amahi Linux Home Server, we expect that support for this will come one day, hopefully sooner rather than later.

At the moment, we’re using Samba to provide file and printer sharing services in a way that is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux, while still retaining the most excellent ext3 Linux file system for the base of the home server. We also use NFS to share some resources easily within the home network.

Backup

Our second topic today is backups. This is always a tough one. Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too! Most times only a certain set of things are needed, depending on the network configuration, number of machines, etc. Here’s Svein’s take on it:

Even if we have a secure way of storing data on the server, we still need a good backup system. And I really prefer a centrally managed system. There should only be a small agent installed on each PC (Windows, OSX or Linux/BSD) and then the rest should be done from the server – setting up what to backup, when and how often. There system must be able to backup files that are in use and to control bandwidth use so it can run in the background even if you are working on the system.

There should be a wide range of options on where to store the backups. The backups of the pc’s in the network could be stored or cached on the server. But there must also be a way to wite to an different medium e.g. DVD+R or tape. Or some other kind of attached storage. Because of this it would be smart to have the backup program divide all backup files into chunks of 2GB or less.

That’s a tall order!

At the moment, Amahi supports two ways to back up. One is periodic, incremental and automatic, essentially as a NAS, and the other is a full disk backup, which restores the OS and all. These are sort of two extremes, for different tastes and different needs:

• Periodic file backups, such as features included in Windows Vista, Mac and Linux.
• Full-disk backups, a la Norton Ghost. We call this PBA (Personal Backup Appliance) and it’s an app for the Amahi LHS.

Versioning File Systems

There are several techniques to solve the issue of managing files in a safe way. Versioning file systems, while fairly well known in technical circles, are one of the newcomers that are starting to become popular. They deal with file systems and also with prior versions as backups, all simultaneously, since the file system includes support for versions built in. This makes the issue of handling versions much simpler, making any client user interface much easier to build.

This allows users to access their file system as it appeared at any point in time. In this area I would like to highlight two options:

• One of them is the ext3cow file system. It’s an open source versioning file system based on ext3. It provides a time-shifting feature that allows a real-time and continuous view of the past.
• ZFS is another one, from Sun Microsystems. ZFS is gaining wide adoption and has lots of acclaims, including encryption and scalability. Some people claimed this was going to be used as an underlaying implementation of Apple’s Time Machine, or perhaps in the time capsule

In the mean time, we have solved the issue of issue of using network disks, such as the HDA, with Apple’s Time Machine. It has been solved by using the handy utility called iTimeMachine. With it, your network drives are usable from Time Machine. Pretty cool!

Thanks to Svein Wisnaes, who wrote with great ideas.

In this series we will also feature suggestions from other home server enthusiasts, so write us or submit your comments!