WHS Vail Fail, Drive Extender, Greyhole and You

Check out what we have for you, a

Drive Extender migration guide

It’s a guide and a comparison of WHS’s Drive Extender vs Greyhole, the Storage Pooling technology built in with Amahi.

It’s things like this that highlight the importance of open source.

Microsoft has discontinued Drive Extender in the next version of Windows Home Server (WHS), nicknamed now #VailFail throughout the social networking sites. If this were open source software this simply could not have happened. Someone could simply fork the project and continue on – let the best code flourish!

This action riled testers, caused  thousands of angry and rude complaints, with many users now looking for a WHS alternative.

Amahi, with it’s implementation of Drive Pooling based on Greyhole, could be an ideal alternative for many.

We have not considered Amahi to be a competitor to Windows Home Server. For one, it’s not backed by a well-heeled corporation like Microsoft. However, many people have, and that’s OK. Just look at what some users have been saying about Amahi and Greyhole vs. WHS:

“[..] I am a freelance cameraman, video editor and photographer, I make high demands on reliability, usability and performance. WHS never cut it for me and the Drobo, which served me well for the past year, has a shockingly lacking performance [..]” — Axel Segebrecht, UK

“[..] So far I am extremely impressed. I have come from 4 reinstallations of WHS … From what I have seen Amahi is rock solid [..]”  —Ben Quittner, Victoria, Australia

“[..] I was an early adopter of Windows Home Server but wasn’t happy with it. It was “delicate”. Issues appeared on a daily basis and it didn’t “play well” with the non-Microsoft computers in my house. [..]” — Richard, Calgary, Canada

There are many more! See them at the Amahi testimonials page.

How You Can Help

At Amahi we care deeply about reliability. A home server has to be very reliable. Amahi is being used by thousands of users daily, most of them 24×7. Many tell us the reliability of Amahi is second to none, and much better than many routers or NAS devices. There was a lot of effort poured into the reliability aspect of Amahi from the very beginning.

Although many people in the community have worked hard to shake bugs out of Greyhole, one of the things that we know we have to do is knock out the more obscure bugs in it. While we have found and fixed a lot of the critical bugs, every software system has tougher bugs lurking. These are usually harder to expose and even harder to catch!

So, if you are interested in helping take Amahi and Greyhole to a whole new level, you can help with the Greyhole grinder initiative.

Reminder: Follow Amahi on Facebook and Twitter

Oh, and a reminder, Amahi recently got a fancy new “official” Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/amahi

So go ahead and “like” Amahi there to follow developments in Facebook. Your response has been great (about 400 fans in just a week or so!). You can also follow us on twitter.

Cheers!

Pic by: moparx

Facebook page, CrashPlan live!

First, you should go to the new Amahi Facebook page and “like it” if you have not done that yet! You know you want to! 🙂

App releases have been a little sparse lately. The new Fedora 14 release is coming along very well and will co-exist nicely with Amahi. We are also working on a makeover of Amahi.org, which takes some time. Here is a teeny sneak peek to our new site 😀

So we’ve picked a couple of nicely featured apps to release to the community. The testing team has been testing these apps for a bit now, so they should be in good shape. Amahi is becoming the largest App Store of its kind with the widest selection of one click webapps and media apps!

The first 3 Commandments of Data Storage and Integrity are Backup, Backup, Backup!  One of the highly sought after features  in a Home Server, is the ability to backup data from all of our network clients.  Now available as an Amahi One Click App is the versatile (and popular) CrashPlan backup solution.

Tin Can Jukebox is a very fast, full featured web jukebox that can securely stream large mp3 collections over the internet to multiple users.


CrashPlanCrashPlanCrashPlan is free for personal use and automatically backs up your computers daily. You can back up to your own drives and other computers for free, and also has a reasonably priced online solution.  For those of you running your Amahi Server headless, some extra configuration is required to access the gui interface.  Please see our CrashPlan wiki for details.


Tin Can JukeboxTin Can JukeboxTin Can Jukebox is a very fast, full featured php/mysql web jukebox that can securely stream large mp3 collections over the internet to multiple users. This app allows multiple users to stream audio with near perfect sound. Many features including Browse by Artist, Album and Genre, Single click to play all from an artist, album or genre, Automatic dynamic downsampling, and Preferences that allow per user customization.  It doesn’t get better than that!

Remember it’s your network and we’re fighting to keep it that way.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Amahi on Fedora 14 Alpha Testing!

Fedora 14

Fedora 14 was released a few hours ago and we got a small flood of requests asking if it’s working. It’s getting there! 🙂

We found an issue in Fedora 14 upstream that caused the Amahi installer to crash. We’re working around it and we’d like to release it for your testing.

Please see this thread on how to start testing Amahi on Fedora 14!

Many thanks go to bigfoot65 for the quick turn-around in isolating critical issues!

A few things will change, so we ask that you do not put this in a “production” system.

Cheers and happy hacking!

Carlos