Amahi Blog

We are happy to announce the release of Amahi 10 today!

This is a transitional release with small-ish updates. It’s a stepping stone towards a more ambitious next release that will include more varied apps and technologies.

The Good: this is a very stable release based on Fedora 25, including a Linux 4.x kernel, with wider file system support (including a new favorite, xfs), and updated software nearly across the board. This release supports upgrading from Amahi 9 and we encourage that. Along with this, we have a much improved Android app. A fairly major update in his release is the PHP stack, which is now at version 7, with more performance and less memory footprint. We have updated a lot of our infrastructure to run more securely and efficiently in the last few months.

The Bad: some of our most popular one-click PHP web apps do not work well or at all on PHP 7. We tested those and will be looking to find a way to release them with the old PHP 5 stack as part of a summer internship program under the Google Summer of Code.

The Ugly: this is not a major update to Amahi and our user interface is a little rough around the edges. We are anticipating a user interface cleanup in a future release soon.

This summer we will have a number of student interns (most of them under the Google Summer of Code program) and we are excited for a much improved Amahi 11 release in the Fall.

The hardware requirements for this release are a 1+GHz, 64-bit processor, 1GB System Memory, 10GB of drive space, internet connectivity (wired only), and as much extra storage as you want!

Thanks to the Amahi community. On behalf of the Core team, thanks for your support!

PS: this past month was the 10th anniversary of the start of Amahi!

We released Disk Stats for Amahi live. Enjoy!

Welcome to Amahi 8!

We would like to take a moment to share with you the release of Amahi 8!

Much hard work has gone into this fantastic release. We think you are going to love the wonderful new features of Amahi 8, even though most of the work that went on it is not visible in plain sight.

Upgradeable

“Can I upgrade my current Amahi server?” We get that a lot and we’ve heard you, and we did our best to make it as easy as possible to upgrade from Amahi 7 to Amahi 8! We hope to make Amahi 8 upgradeable to future releases as well so that there is less need to reinstall!

New-disk Wizard

Amahi 8 includes a new Disk Wizard  app that makes it much easier to expand your storage with additional drives.  It is now a matter of a few clicks to add new disks to the system, from within the Amahi dashboard. This effort has taken place over a year and has involved two interns of the Google Summer of Code (2014) and the Amahi Summer of Code (2015). Thanks go to Kasun and Ahmed for their contributions to this new disk wizard, as well as all the testers that have put their effort into making it work well. We believe it will work in most cases, but we still have some work to do on it, making it better and better.

Tons of Apps, out of the Gate

Another significant contribution in this release is app testing. Amahi 8 includes more than 200 apps that we have tested, out of the gate, to work well. The team worked hard to create this automatic testing framework and mirror system to ensure app installs are effortless, fast and work well. This will make us have a better testing system and release Amahi faster in the future, a long-term goal of ours!

Great kudos go to our testmaster bigfoot65 for the huge, multi-month efforts to get this system going as well as td512 for providing a dedicated server for Amahi to use in our repo and mirror system!

A More Modern Interface, more Features, Faster

You may have noticed that the Forums have a new, polished, look. However, we also spent time improving the appearance of your HDA! Amahi 8 uses a new template system called Bootstrap, made by Twitter, giving it a more responsive and consistent feel across browsers and devices.

Besides this, we have fixed some bugs, upgraded our SSL infrastructure, added features like a more flexible DHCP lease range, per-user access control for apps, XFS filesystem support (provided by the Fedora 21 OS, which will allow us to upgrade faster), easy checking of share disk usage, and improved internationalization.

Kudos!

Thanks to the Amahi community for their great feedback and involvement! This is what inspires us to keep working, and make Amahi better with each version!

Team Amahi

We are  thrilled to announce Amahi 7.4! There are a lot of technical changes and improvemens in this release. So much so, that we should have called it Amahi 8. It’s an automatic update for all Amahi 7 users!

The biggest addition is the introduction a new Amahi plugin system which enables new kinds of apps. This system broadens the capabilities of what apps can accomplish, tapping into the core capabilities of Amahi systems.  We have built a first few plugin-based apps to showcase some examples: Disk Stats, Web Apps, Database Backups and the up-and-coming New-disk Wizard.

The second major feature is the Greyhole UI app. Also a plugin-based app, the long awaited return of a graphical interface for Greyhole allows easier management of your pool of drives (JBOD).  This was an often requested feature and we hope it can be beefed up over time to provide more controls. As a launch promotion, we have a specially low price of $14.95 (lowered by $10) for this app and will make a donation in the name of the Amahi community to the Greyhole project. Get it while it’s hot and contribute directly to Greyhole!

Another feature is the switch to the popular Bootstrap framework from Twitter. This is a modern web front-end that will make our transition to mobile responsiveness quicker.

A big performance improvement was added with the move to  Ruby on Rails version 4 and the Ruby 2 programming language. The use of RoR 4.1 and Ruby 2 drastically improves the performance of Amahi with better security and greater efficiency.

Another feature is the addition of an OpenNIC DNS option. This DNS server is different from other public servers because it’s more open and protects your privacy. There is no government or ISP intervention and you can rest assured that your internet connection is no longer being censored. You will no longer be tracked through your DNS requests, and not be a victim to ISP DNS Hijacking.

This release also includes a bunch of fixes and updates, including support for the Amahi mobile apps for iPhone/iPad and the new beta app for Android.

The Summer of Code!

A big reason for all these new features is our talented group of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program interns as well as a couple of Amahi Summer of Code interns contributing to Amahi’s Open Source efforts! Here they are

• Arpit Goyal (@agmps17, from New Delhi, India) — with contributions to the Amahi Platform
• Artur Dryomov (@ming, from Belarus) — with contributions to our most excellent Android app
• Nilesh Jagnik (@nileshjagnik, from New Delhi, India) — Amahi Anywhere server, Golang SPDY libray, go-metadata libraries
• Kasun Thennakoon (@tmkasun, from Ganemulla, Sri Lanka) – Plugins, creator of the fantastic new disk wizard (to be released live soon)
• Kevin Chow (@kchow, from Santa Clara, California) – Community outreach

New Additions to the Team

We would like to take this opportunity to welcome two new members to the core team, Bogdan Mitrea and Arpit Goyal!

First we have a long-time Amahi community member Bogdan Mitrea (@megabitdragon), who has been a founder of the Amahi Google+ community, app tester and contributor, and now has been mentoring the GSoC project to develop our Android app. Bogdan tells it like it is, always in a cheerful mode, with sharp wit and smarts no less sharper, he has been a joy to work with over the years. Welcome Bogdan!

Last but definitely not least, we would like to recognize Arpit Goyal (@agmps17), who started as a GSoC student, for his great contributions to the Amahi Platform. He has shown true ability with Ruby and RoR and can do great team work. He has shown commitment to Amahi and resilience to try new avenues of development and open-mindedness to understand all points of view. For this we are pleased to welcome him and Bogdan to the Amahi core team!

Their contributions have been tremendous! Thanks to all in the program as well as the people in the community who helped test these features in the platform and in the Amahi Android app!

It’s been quiet and productive in the Amahi labs lately!

Today we are proud to announce an exciting new feature for our latest edition, Amahi 7.  It’s the easiest way yet to access your data with mobile devices, the Amahi iOS client, and a matching app for your HDA that we call Amahi Anywhere. As the name implies, this app and the client gives you the ability to easily and securely access the data stored on your Amahi HDA from your mobile devices.

All it takes is a one-click install app on your Amahi HDA, and a client on your iPad or iPhone and you will be able to access files, stream movies, music, and more. Amahi for iOS is available now in the Apple App Store. A client for Android devices is coming soon!

Features of the iOS app:

• No setup, no port-forwarding, no VPN needed!
• AirPlay support to play to other devices like Apple TV and XBMC
• Intuitive, iOS 7 style interface
• Embedded VLC iOS codebase in collaboration with VideoLAN team
• Support for most popular media codes and containers like MKV, MPEG-4,
• Embedded VLC player (version 2.1.0), with dynamic selection of tracks, subtitles and aspect ratio
• … and more

If you are wondering what is the magic? It’s the magic of Open Source FLOSS Software!

The Amahi team has created a SPDY proxy library and sample clients that makes all of the above possible. And we made it Open Source! The SPDY prococol is on track for becoming the 2.0 version of the HTTP protocol. Follow the link for all the technical details.

What’s more exciting? We’re working on back-porting Amahi Anywhere for Amahi 6 (on Ubuntu) and also on an Android client! Update: Amahi Anywhere is available for Amahi 6 as of December 24 2013. Merry Christmas!

To learn more about the new features and everything else that is going on with Amahi, tune in to this Wednesday’s episode of The TWiT Network’s “FLOSS Weekly” show who will feature the Amahi team lead Carlos Puchol!

Update: watch the FLOSS video or listen to the audio of the interview in this FLOSS weekly page.

Hosts Aaron Newcomb and Dan Lynch will grill Carlos about what is new with Amahi and what is on the horizon.

To catch it live tune Wednesday December 4th at 8:30am PST/11:30 EST/17:30 CES, or catch it recorded in the TWiT page!