App madness! … Oh, Amahi reaches 60K users!

Amahi keeps on growing, thanks to you! Recently Amahi reached 60,000 users, across nearly 40 countries!

To commemorate the occasion, we just did an app release marathon through the St. Patrick’s Day weekend!

The idea was to release a number of apps that look stable in testing and pound on them to make sure they work well.  If any issues are found with an app, we will pull them for diagnosis and repair.  The more people we have installing and testing the new apps, the more rapidly we can detect issues!  We have released all the Apps, and  are monitoring feedback on Facebook and Twitter.

The 12 apps released live are listed below. So far all are working well! We have seen some instability with one (Redmine), and we’re keeping an eye on it.

Enjoy! The team is back to testing more apps and preparing the next upcoming release !



SubsonicSubsonic

Subsonic is a web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music. Use it to share your music with friends, or to listen to your own music while at work. You can stream to multiple players simultaneously, for instance to one player in your kitchen and another in your living room.

 



WikkaWikiWikkaWiki

WikkaWiki is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Forked from WakkaWiki. Designed for speed, fine-grained access control, extensibility, and security.

 



Home InventoryHome Inventory

Home Inventory is a light-weight web application that aims to help you organize and track items in your home for inventory, insurance or other purposes.

 



JoomlaJoomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

 



Tiny Tiny RSSTiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS is a web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.

 



MediaTombMediaTomb

MediaTomb is a DLNA/UPnP MediaServer with an easy web user interface. It allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.

 


DrupalDrupal

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

 



Sick BeardSick Beard

The ultimate PVR application that downloads and manages your TV shows. Automatically finds new and old episodes for you and it works with your current download client!

 



CrashPlanCrashPlan

CrashPlan 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.

 



RedmineRedmine

Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.

 



qBittorrentqBittorrent

qBittorrent 2 is a multi-platform Bittorrent client. Its main features are its integrated search engine (allows searching for torrent from the main torrent Web sites simultaneously in a transparent fashion), its support for UPnP/NAT-PMP, Bittorrent protocol encryption (Azureus-compatible), Peer Exchange (PeX) compatible with µTorrent, IP filtering (eMule-like “ipfilter.dat” or PeerGuardian filters), Torrents (and the files they contain) prioritizing, remote control through a secure Web User Interface.

 



SolitaireSolitaire

Solitaire, also called Patience, is a single-player card games involving a layout of cards with a goal of sorting them in some manner. It is played with one standard 52-card decks shuffled together. The objective of solitaire game is typically to sort the pack of cards into order in accordance with particular rules of play. Player wins if the sorting is successful.

On behalf of the Amahi Team, we hope you enjoy the new apps. Thanks for your continued support!

 

UPDATE:  Sorry folks, but due to some technical difficulties with Redmine, it has been moved back to BETA.  Once we can resolve them, it will be restored to LIVE status.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

 

UPDATE PART II: We were unable to get the issues with Redmine sorted out. We have chosen to release The Bug Genie as a replacement. We hope you enjoy!

 


 

The Bug GenieThe Bug Genie
An open source, web-based issue tracking system – built on free and open source technology. Enhancing your development process by offering an advanced tool to manage bug reports, feature requests and user feedback for your products.

App autobackups … Easy app updates!

We have been busy updating several of your favorite Amahi applications over the past few weeks.

One of theAmahi Safe most frequent issues that we hear about is the need to update an application to a newer version but the data from the old version may be essentially lost, unless you know how to back it up with things like phpMyBackup or phpMyAdmin (which can be error-prone).

No more! Steps have been taken to help protect your data for upgrade. Keeping with our data integrity mantra, we are proud to announce a new feature to Amahi!

We have deployed a new feature called “autobackup” for a selected group of applications.  These apps will automatically back up the existing database when select applications are uninstalled. When you install the new version, your data is imported, automatically!

These apps include some big ones like Drupal, Horde, FengOffice, eyeOS and Gallery. We are working to make this feature available to all apps that have data going forward. Tell us your favorite application you would like to see this feature for and we will do that first.

We hope you enjoy the updated versions for your HDA. It’s your network and Amahi helps you run it easily!

Thank you for your continued support!

The Amahi Team

Amahi 4.2: Burning rubber and HD streaming

Check this out! Amahi 4.2 was released today! And with it come massive performance improvements!

Amahi 4.1:   2.10 MB/second

Amahi 4.2:   14.08 MB/secondAmahi 4.2: Burning rubber and HD Streaming

That’s a well over a 6-fold improvement in file write performance in Amahi 4.2 (released today) vs. 4.1!

If you do backups or other write-intensive operation to your HDA, you will love this new version!

How do you get it?

  1. Your HDA should have 4.2 unless you disabled automatic updates. Make sure you have Platform 4.2 or greater. Check in Setup -> Settings.
  2. Make sure you change at least one setting in your shares area (Setup -> Shares) so that the new settings take full effect (depending on the OS, you may have to re-connect the client).

With this new platform you are likely to get anywhere from modest to very large performance improvements in file transfers, though your mileage may vary depending on your hardware and wiring.

We have seen 3 to 6 times improvements over a gigabit network (two routers, not-so-great cabling). This means we can now easily stream two HD streams over the network while network backups are going on without jitter

Now, … if only my desktop could handle one 1080p stream without jitter … 😀

Premature Optimizations

When we started Amahi, we picked reasonable, safe and stable settings for various subsystems, including Samba.

As we improved things around, we kind of neglected to optimize subsystems along the way. Generally speaking we’re more interested in stability and reliability. You may have heard a famous statement by Don Knuth (a legendary prof in Computer Science), “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

One of our entrepreneurial users, Pegasus, pointed out that the default Samba settings were more conservative than they ought to be. Lo and behold, a single setting we had been using for a while was, er, rather suboptimal. The new settings (see bug #342 for the gory details) provide massive improvements in writes performance (we have seen 300 to 670% improvements) and modest improvements in read performance, 15 to 25%.

This, along with a few other small changes, was benefit enough to warrant an unplanned release, v4.2, to the stable version of Amahi.

The upcoming version 5.0 will bring optimizations, with more than 30% improvements in performance and memory footprint for the platform! Stay tuned!

How we Tested

The testing was performed with a 3.4 GB ISO image writing it and reading it from an HDA, as an rsync copy via SMB-mounted shares from my HDA to a Mac OS X desktop. The two machines are separated by two inexpensive gigabit “green switches” chained with (below average) cat5 cable. Obviously the disks and IO subsystems of the machines matter too, but this will give you an idea how how this testing was performed. Three people in the community used these settings successfully for over a week.

Hope you enjoy it!

Update 8.17: PBA to not count extended partitions

This update includes PBA version 0.23, our full-disk backup app. The application web interface now skips adding up partition sizes for extended partitions.

Prior to this, disks with extended partitions would be reported to be larger than the actual disk, because extended partitions would be counted towards the size of the disk, even though they don’t really take disk space themselves.

Actual backup and restore functionality was unaffected by this bug.

PBA Backups

Updates: platform software, pba

updates
We have released version 0.91 of the platform software to fix some HTML formatting issues we came across while developing a new theme.

As part of this, we realized that the PBA icon does not have a transparent background, so we’re releasing that too, as version hda-app-pba-0.21.