Amahi Blog

We always find it exciting when enthusiasts write to us with with their wish list for a home server!

After the holiday and new years break, we at Amahi are still recovering from the food and excitement …

We’re starting the new year with a multi-part series on

What I want for a home server

This comes courtesy of Svein Wisnaes, with some editions and my own comments, who wrote with great ideas. We will also feature suggestions from other server fashionistas 🙂

Without further ado, let’s start … (and pardon the pun in the picture!)

What I want from a home server, Part I – RAID

RAID 1

Whether it is soft or hardware based (Svein really prefers hardware based, so
he likes support for Highpoint, 3ware and Promise drivers at least…), a
home server needs to have a solid system for securing files.

Now, why RAID-1?

Well, a single point of failure will always be the RAID control
mechanism, either as software or hardware. If you use RAID-1, you can
just take one drive out of the server and mount it on a different PC and
you have access to all your data. If you use RAID-5 or RAID-6, you are
not sure to be able to recover your raid if the controller goes south …

RAID-1 is not as efficient as RAID-5 or RAID-6 in terms of storage
space, but in his opinion, the security is higher.

The system drive should also be on a RAID-1 setup so it is not lost
because of harddrive failure. The whole OS including programs, not any
user data or backup data, should fit on a relatively small drive so
there is no cost excuse to skip running a RAID-1 for it.

Another Amahi Home Server enthusiast Toru writes that the RAID setup must be simple to set-up. Clearly this is a must in a tech-consumer market once you move out of the pure enthusiast!

Having been at NVIDIA before, we favor NVIDIA nForce solutions in motherboards,
though we’re not sure the tools are supported in Linux.

The Amahi Home Server is agnostic to the hardware it’s running on. The more hardware protection the merrier. We know we have had a fair share of disk failures over the years …

That’s all for now on the interesting subject of RAID.

Today, as we’re going through what we hope is the last week of testing for Amahi 6, we’re happy to announce the Amahi Ready™ program for hardware vendors and our first partnership in this program, by way of Evo Technologies, a Korean manufacturer of eco-friendly computer systems.

This is the first partnership for an off-the-shelf system with Amahi pre-installed, something that has been in big demand among Amahi users.

So if you’ve wanted to buy Amahi pre-installed, Evo Technologies is shipping the first system worldwide today. Meet the ECOPC N.1!

Green. Silent. Small.
The N.1 uses 10~11W at idle, 16W at full CPU load with 2.5″ SSD (18W with 2.5″ HDD) and less than 1W at standby. It uses about 90% less power than standard PC. It saves on electric bills and reduces the environmental impact of CO2 emissions. The N.1 can be operated with a small fan, or totally fanless, therefore you don’t need to worry about a fan failing. No fan means no noise!

Facebook Likes, UPSs, FlexRAID and WOL, Wiki improvements

What an amazing few weeks we had. Amahi’s Facebook page has been abuzz with all sorts of suggestions and discussions. Everything from an energy saving feature, flexraid, UPS integration, and Wake-on-LAN (WOL) were discussed!

The Race to 1K and redesigned Facebook page!

The race to 1,000 Likes is on! Who do you know that could use Amahi? It’s our new goal here at Amahi, WE NEED 1,000 fans! So go out tell a friend or two, whether they have our platform installed or not, to jump on Facebook and Like us! So while you’re there check out the redesigned page! We like the increased fluidity of the page and how it feels more like a personal users page!

WOL, FlexRAID and UPS Integration

Amahi is all about variety and choice. Many people do not know much about using Wake-on-LAN (WOL). WOL is implemented for devices with DHCP leases and Static IPs, under Setup > Networking. This was introduced to Amahi last year, and you can “wake” devices remotely with it. Great for the highly resourceful user!

FlexRAID is a highly scalable and smart storage system currently in beta that turns independent hard drives of various sizes, makes, and models into storage pools and storage pools into storage clouds.

Amahi Energy Saver is a project to make devices more energy-efficient. This project got an update and has a determined leader (hi jackrock!) and looks like it will be nicely integrated with Amahi! It’s in alpha, however, we hope to take it a step further to make energy savings part of the Amahi platform.

Recently we’ve also had an update on how to integrate a UPS with Amahi. Ghuiber’s efforts are documented in the Amahi Wiki under UPS setup.

Wiki Upgrades

If you followed those wiki links above you will have no doubt noticed the huge improvements in how the wiki looks and feels, with great looking templates for code, links, and easy to use notices. The speed at which the wiki changes is quite remarkable! And the amount of spam we get now in it has been curbed down big time. Take a moment to thank people improving the wiki and especially our wiki czars, smystaki and bigfoot65, for making all these great documentation improvements possible!

You told us what you think

Our goal with Amahi is to provide an easy, reliable, and expandable software platform for all of you.  We’ve asked the Facebook followers this: “What do you use Amahi for?”,  the answers probably seem familiar to most of you:

• Media Server
• VPN Server
• File Server
• App Server

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

I feel good! … like I knew that I would … oh hey, hello! 🙂

We’re happy to share that Amahi just got chosen the Hottest Pick award by Linux Format magazine!

… there aren’t many easier ways of getting [a server] set up than installing [Amahi]

That’s what they had to say! Linux Format is UK’s largest  Linux magazine and one of the largest circulation Linux mags in the world, including bookstores and electronics stores. The March issue (LXF129) will be in the shelves in the next 2 or 3 weeks, so look for it!

In addition to this, next Wednesday March 10, at 1.30pm PST (10:30pm EST), there is a live interview about Amahi with founder Carlos Puchol on TWIT.TV’s FLOSS Weekly, one of the most popular free/open source video casts. We’re happy to be featured in this program which often brings illustrious guests. Video to be available a few hours after the live program ends. Suggest your questions to discuss!

Release time! Drum roll please …

Today we announce Amahi 5.2. The bits should be already installed in most Amahi systems by now. This is mostly a bugfix release, with a few major features taking shape, many of them contributed by a strong new team member Guillaume Boudreau (aka Mouton):

• Notably, we have started working on integrating a very exciting Drive Pooling technology called Greyhole: redundancy across drives, expandable storage on a JBOD-like architecture!
• Added an “extras” options in the shares to do a lot of advanced things, like adding quotas, running antivirus, add recycle bins to shares, add guest access, or auditing capabilities, in addition to supporting the development of Greyhole.
• Automatic support for automatic time zone setup of  PHP applications
• Automatically back up app databases when updating and of course other improvements for supporting apps
• TONS of application updates: eyeOS, FengOffice, Ampache, Gallery, etc. etc.
• The DLNA server has been updated to support M3U/PLS playlists
• AmahiTunes has been released as a new app with streaming built in right on the app
• Improvements to Dutch, Spanish, with new alpha support for Japanese
• … and many more fixes and improvements!

Simplicity is what we aim for! It’s your network and Amahi  makes it easy to keep it that way. No complex setup, no graduate degree, and no other software installation is needed. We’re thrilled that Amahi has been recognized in this way by a well known magazine!

Now, one of the things that we don’t do enough is to thank you, the community. You have been with us through thick and thin, always diligently reporting what works and what doesn’t, made contributions, improved documentation, and most of all you have continued to share and evangelize the amazing features of Amahi. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

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, JetTheNerd’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!

On the heels of one of our strongest releases, today we announce the release of version 4.1 of the Amahi platform!

This release added some nice features in addition to delivering a great amount of stability updates to the core and GUI updates to the user interface!

Lots of testing has been done in this release by the community. And a great job at that! A very special thanks go to Mr Orange for contributing a substantial amount of the patches and fixes included!

Changes to the User Interface:

• Add some support for Router Control for DD-WRT routers, Linksys routers, from the WRT54G series, and some D-Link models (more on router control)
• The dashboard and setup pages now use long URLs (http://ampache.home.com) as opposed to short URLs (http://ampache), because some clients (*cough*windows*cough*) have trouble with short URLs, depending on their network configuration. Note that short URLs, a uniquely cool Amahi feature, still work, so you can still use them! Bug #274
• Rearranging of menus in the setup area based on usability feedback, to make things run with faster response times and have more meaningful interaction – Bug #296
• Proper support for temperature monitoring of drives when using RAID and LVM! Before, that panel would get confused when LVM or RAID were in use – Bug #8, #11, #34
• New GUI option to change the (SAMBA) shares workgroup interactively – Bug #289
• General stability improvements in the platform to work with apps better, better errors on bad downloads – Bug #176, #309
• New area in the Setup -> Settings tab containing the current version of the platform and the core running (that is an FAQ after each release!)

Platform core:

• New feature to allow multiple connections on the Amahi built-in VPN simultaneously
• Introduction of a new installer, which will support things like automated installed (i.e. entirely unattended), automatic network configurations, etc.
• Fix bug #311: making sure the DHCP server and the DNS server obey faithfully the servers settings set by the user, as well bug #313, which introduced spurious errors.
• Add feature #308: new utility script to let the user change the network settings if they mistyped them or misconfigured them
• Fix bug #250 and #294, which caused hdactl to not be restarted properly, causing daemonized zombie processes to be left around. Luckily this was not too harmful, as they were just sitting idle.
• Fixed a dependency in the installer to make it easier to support the people who install with LiveCD, though it’s not really supported 🙂
• Support platform changes to manage the default DHCP lease time. For some reason, some folks need this. I know the type – those who run a tight ship. (Bug #201)
• Add a feature to set the DHCP server default time zone properly and automatically
• Fix an error in the installer for users whose domain/settings contained the word “error” … you know who you are 🙂

If you have not updated yet to Fedora 10 and you are still on Fedora 9, here is a very nice guide from long-standing contributor Brandon Kernell how how to upgrade your distro!