Amahi Newsletter No. 4

In this newsletter

  • Amahi Launch and Holiday Party!
  • We’ve Doubled!
  • More News
  • Seeking Guest Bloggers

Launch and Holiday Party!



Ready or not, we’re launching!

Amahi is throwing a Launch and Holiday party!

And you are invited!

We’d like to party with our team, our users, and all our friends. All the people who have helped us, with hard work, advice, sharing great connections, insights and encouragement!

Party is December 21st at 6pm, in Sunnyvale, California.

Please RSVP for headcount by email (contact us directly if you did not receive the email).

Come unwind and kick off the Holiday season at our Launch Party! We will have music, drinks, food and great company!
Acunote - Agile Project Management

If you would like to bring stuff let us know to coordinate!

The party is generously co-sponsored by our startup friends at Acunote (a very useful, not to mention cool, Agile Project Management), FocalPower (Innovative Services for professional Photographers) and Marale (Top-notch Engineering Services for a Greener World). Thanks guys!

We’ve Doubled!

FocalPower

We have doubled our install base! And we are readying our web site to accelerate that. Thanks and welcome to all the new users!

We have a brand new site! This site is the home for remote management of HDAs, be it yours or others (like family ones, or friends, or small businesses). We have a brand new FAQ that we keep updating over time.
Marale - Engineering Services

The site is in private beta and we will be expanding the beta for our launch!

We did a new full release which got received so very positively. We’re also working on the next one.

To promote the site, we did a bit of marketing. Through that and through user interest, we’re in the first page of search engines when searching for linux home server and similar queries! (though it fluctuates heavily week by week.)

Agedashi theme
We have also been working on a theme engine for the HDA dashboard (our very first feature request), and our friend Alvin, who is a great designer, has been working on our first theme, Agedashi (click the thumbnail to see the full screen). Thanks Alvin!!

More News

As some of you know, I have taken an interesting consulting job with a thriving startup founded by some friends to help finance Amahi. This has slowed development somewhat. We’re looking for ways to speed that up, including recruiting smart developers to work on some of our very coolest Ruby on Rails, Python or PHP plug-ins.

We have been busy putting together a management team, which remains our top priority. Although it’s a slow process at times, we hope to find a full-time CEO and/or VP of Marketing soon. If you know of someone interested in this space, get in touch with us!

While that proceeds its due course, we continue to be hard at work refining features, fixing bugs and more importantly doing more installs until it’s all fully automated through our web site.

Seeking Guest Bloggers!

One of the things we would like to do is chronicle home server and/or home theater PCs (HTPC) being installed, to get a better grasp on the crucial issues people face in home networking.

If you or someone you know is thinking of building an Amahi HDA, or an HTPC, and would like to guest blog, please get in touch! Similarly, if you would like to invite us to guest in your blog, let us know.

So, get ready and come on by to the Amahi Launch and Holiday party!

Great example of a DIY Linux home server

One thing we do as enthusiasts for Linux and our Amahi Linux Home Server is monitor the interesting projects of people building their DIY linux home servers.

Yesterday we came across this greatly interesting example in a posting by Dave from http://davenjudy.org.

Daves Blog

In his posting, Dave goes on to describe a Linux home server built from scratch, in what looks like great care.

The hardware is a Linux software RAID system with a fairly modest hardware, however, as Dave points out, suitable for the task.

Here are the functions that Dave packs into the server:

  • Local mail server, running his own domain
  • File server with SAMBA and with NFS
  • Printer server, with CUPS
  • NTP server, to keep clocks on your various systems synchronized
  • DHCP server
  • DNS server
  • Firewall
  • Backup server, with amanda, a great system for backups
  • SMTP with sendmail

A fairly power-user setup as far as software is concerned!!

Now, these are the kind of users we’d like! 🙂

While most of those services come up by default with the Amahi Linux Home Server installs, we don’t have email (IMAP/POP) as well as SMTP and automatic CUPS configuration by default. We probably should.

On the other hand, we have calendaring, bittorrents (which we should document properly , as it’s one of our cooler features), wiki as well as VPN.

Our backup solutions are different than amanda, however, they are complementary.

What do you guys think? What features should we integrate?

Thanks to Dave for the description of his setup! We loved his tagline!

We were left wondering what flavor of Linux you used, Dave …

… may we interest you in a new linux home server setup? 🙂

New page for FAQ

Hi!

We just posted a new page to hold the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) of the Amahi Linux Home Server.

After our recent announcement in Freshmeat, we got a few interested users in trying it, some of them having some questions that would benefit being in the FAQ.Amahi Linux Home Server

We’re steadily adding to the FAQ. Submit new questions!