I sense a disturbance in the force …

Just when we’re about to have another major release … I am sensing some disturbance in the force. It must be our release testing! 🙂

Don’t you hate it when email goes down??

Email Delays

For the third time in three weeks, we’re having Amahi email delays issues. All these issues have been independent.

  • The first time around there were some DNS issues for the root DNS server of our registrar. Very unusual.
  • The second time was when someone in the same network block as our email server was having some virus/spambot infections and someone, somewhere, decided to label us as spammers. Not nice!
  • Lastly, for the last 36 hours we have incoming email down due to a server supply motherboard being busted!

Email is both simple, yet notoriously hard to manage reliably. Only when things fail I realize how complex my “email tree” is! Mailing lists, Google groups, Yahoo groups, spam, personal email, Blackberry email (hmm, yummy!) … the works.

You tell me … 🙂

Incidentally, we’re getting closer to releasing an email server for Amahi, yet I still don’t understand why people chose to run their own email server 🙂

Cartoon by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper.

The Rise of the “Web App Gallery”

We knew it was coming, and it’s here: the “Web App Gallery.”

But, I am sorry to say, the resources of the empire beat the far flung energy of the rebellion: Microsoft announced their Web App Gallery just a few days ago. Needless to say, I am confident the rebellion has more features/functionality and flexibility in the Amahi Web App Gallery.msoftwebapp

The developers in the Amahi community are working feverishly to complete the “App Gallery” functionality for mainstream release. Currently it is ready for the hard core, and a few features/bugs are being ironed out before we release to the public. When we do release it will be a strategic battle win for the rebellion.

There will be a host of applications ready – from UPnP/DLNA media servers to web site analytic tools. It’s hard to keep the community’s contributors at bay. Hopefully we won’t have to for too long now.

Stay tuned!

More User/Application Activity

This is a quick report on the burgeoning Amahi community.

It seems that “one-click” install is quite an appealing feature. So much so that out of the blue a few members stepped up ahead of schedule and became application contributors. This was before we have the infrastructure ready to support them! Luckily we have the manpower (at this stage). We plan to have a seamless process flow setup and ready to run in the not too distant future.

As I write this we are simultaneously: contributors-area-2

  1. documenting the process to add an application for one-click installation
  2. preparing www.amahi.org to support one-click installs
  3. building www.amahi.org infrastructure to support application contributors
  4. adding features for managing feedback on each application
  5. enhancing member communication sub-system for different levels of communications

This will let the Amahi community scale without the relatively high dependence on manpower we currently have. As you might imagine each of these items entails quite a bit of work, but from the activity in the community we know it will be worth it.

We want all this done yesterday, but of course it takes time. Stay tuned!

“Best” Home Server Software

The next release of the Amahi home server platform will be really exciting, and is going to happen really soon! The release will, without doubt, make Amahi the “Best Home Server Software” available.

OK, enough silly talk. I have to write a response to the article at LifeHacker.com. As I write this entry, the article sits with 1106 diggs – and it does not even mention Amahi. Apache even made the list!? That’s just plain weird, as Apache is hard to manage directly by regular humans. Next time a reporter does an investigation of the available Home Servers we expect that they’ll be able to find Amahi!appinstall

Why the confidence? Well, the next release will support one-click installation of apps over the web.

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Bug Tracker – Yes, we have bugs!

redminescr

The growth in the Amahi Home Server community has finally forced the core team at Amahi to install a ‘scalable’ bug tracking process. Accessible through the bug tracker (an instance of the great Redmine bug tracker), it shares single sign-on with other amahi.org systems.

Not only used for users to identify bugs/issues with the home server, it is also a mechanism for feedback and feature requests.

Of course, if there’s some feature you’d like to see in the Amahi Home Server start a discussion in the forums and then create a feature request in the bug tracker (once you have gathered some feedback from the community on your thoughts/idea!)

The more involvement you garner the quicker the development team will focus on your request! And if you have a patch for it, so much faster 😉 !

It’s already well populated! The activity monitoring page is a great window to know what’s going on with the project, as it integrates bugs and feature activity as well as changes in the code happening Git repo!