Tap your data! Welcome the Amahi mobile app, say hello to Amahi Anywhere!

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:Amahi Mobile App for iOS

  • 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!

Security advisory: shares could be writeable when not meant to

No sooner we called this week “bug week” in our recent post … we found a somewhat serious bug in Amahi, the first in years. That is not what we meant by bug week!

The bug in question is that under certain conditions, users who should not have write permissions to a share could potentially write to it. It was fixed within minutes of being reported and the fix is available for the Amahi 6 beta. Fortunately there is an easy work-around for everyone else.

Who is Affected

If you set permissions to per-user access control to shares, you could be affected. If you did not turn off global writeability to the share before enabling per-user share control, you are affected.

Here is how it may happen: When a share has the “All users” and “Writeable” selected (which is the default) and the admin wants to manage per-users permissions and to give some users either read-only or no permissions, All users is unchecked. If Writeable is not unchecked first, users can still write to the share.

Typically one would click on All users to unclick it, to show all the users to control their permissions individually, without clicking on Writeable. Then manage the different users permissions. In this situation, the share would still be writeable to all users.

The Workaround

Fortunately, there is an easy work-around: unclick Writeable to before clicking on All users to manage their permissions individually. So, if you were affected and you had per-user permissions, you do this:

  • check All users to enable all users access
  • uncheck Writeable and then check All users again. All should be good then!

We have released and tested a fix for the Amahi 6 Beta release. You can see the details of the bug in our bug tracker.

Thanks go to Jimmy Hosio for hunting down this issue and to Bogdan (aka megabitdragon) for very quickly helping verify the fix!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Apps are blooming everywhere! OpenVPN ALS, Bookmarks (Weave), and phpLogCon

It’s been a brisk month for Amahi, with the Hottest Pick award from Linux Format, and the FLOSS Weekly interview.  We’ve also had a record number of installs this month. Welcome new users!  If you haven’t done so already, please stop by the community channel and say hello!

So, to continue our pace, we are taking 3 very exciting Apps from beta to live, to make Amahi even more useful!

First is a very useful app from our prolific contributor Mouton: the Amahi Bookmarks App. Based on Mozilla’s Weave Sync API for the Firefox browser. Now you can sync your bookmarks, history, and passwords across all of your machines (and across all the users the your network!) with the Firefox Weave plug-in. A number of us on the team are using it already!

The often asked question “How can I access my data from outside my network?”, now has a straight forward solution.  Although OpenVPN is available by default with Amahi,  with ALS you don’t need a machine with a client installed.  OpenVPN ALS allows you to securely access your network through any browser that supports HTTPS.

And for the analyst in you, we offer in our Application Gallery, the web based phpLogCon.  Now it’s quick and easy to find that log entry by opening a simple browser window.

Read on!



BookmarksBookmarks

Sync server for Mozilla Weave. Allows you to sync your Mozilla Firefox bookmarks, passwords, open tabs and history to your Amahi HDA using the Mozilla Weave add-on.
This application sets up a personal sync server for use with the ‘Weave Sync’ add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

Weave Sync currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs; you can preserve your settings on your own Amahi HDA.



OpenVPN ALSOpenVPN ALS

OpenVPN ALS (project Adito) is a web-based VPN server written in Java. OpenVPN ALS has a browser-based AJAX UI which allows easy access to intranet services. Once installed and configured correctly, you will be able to access all your files and most of the applications on your HDA using your custom Amahi URL (tested with Firefox and Internet Explorer).



phpLogConphpLogCon

phpLogCon is a web interface to syslog and other network event data. It provides easy browsing and some basic analysis of realtime network events. Depending on the applications feeding the database, it can process syslog messages, Windows event log entries and even SNMP trap data – just to name a few.


Cheers!

The Amahi Team!

Amahi Bookmarks App. Based on Mozilla’s Weave Sync API

Squeezebox Server, clipperz, phpman, adminer and more … enjoy!

“Rolling, … rolling, …  rolling on the river…”*

The Amahi Team is at it again. Rolling out 5.0 first, then it was four new apps, and now more! We know what you’re thinking… (we’re thinking it too) do those guys at Amahi ever sleep?

The short answer is occasionally! We’re busy working on Amahi 5.1 and bringing you all of these new applications for your enjoyment. We start with the very popular SqueezeCenter! Enjoy the Holidays and read on ….



Squeezebox ServerSqueezeCenter

Logitech introduces Squeezebox Server 7 (formerly SqueezeCenter and SlimServer) is a powerful and free Open Source software. Not only will it power any Squeezebox™ or Transporter®, but also any software MP3 player on your network.

This robust Open Source software includes contributions from a worldwide community of developers who are driven by the desire to work on exciting projects. The efforts of Logitech’s Open Source community results in rapid development and a rich set of features, evolving in response to user feedback.

Squeezebox Server Software

  • Web Interface—control the player and manage playlists from a web browser
  • MP3 & WMA Internet radio
  • Alarm clock
  • and much more…


phpManphpMan

phpMan is a unix Man page / Perldoc / Info page Web Interface runs on PHP 4.2 above. One file script makes it easier to read man pages which is lengthy and require you to use ‘more’ or ‘pg’ filters. This app allows you to search any command to get info on said command or get the manual for it (ie man). Just try it if you feel hard to remember the command for page back or need to dump man page into text/html format.



AdminerAdminer

Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin) is a full-featured MySQL management tool written in PHP. Conversely to phpMyAdmin, it consist of a single file ready to deploy to the target server.
Features for Adminer include:

  • Connect to a database server with username and password
  • Select an existing database or create a new one
  • and much much more


ClipperzClipperz

You can think of Clipperz as your web Rolodex, a card index where you can enter any sort of confidential data without worrying about security. It can be used to store and freely organize passwords, confidential notes, burglar alarm codes, credit and debit card details, PINs, software keys, etc.
Clipperz does solve the “password fatigue” and make the Internet the most convenient and safe place to store private and sensitive data. However since passwords are the most common type of sensitive information that you need to protect, we added a lot of functionalities to make Clipperz the best online password manager.

Features

  • One-click login – Users can store the details of their online services into Clipperz and quickly create a “direct login” link for each of them: just one click to authenticate and access the online service without typing any username and password.
  • Offline copy – Users can dump their encrypted data from Clipperz servers to a local hard disk or USB drive and create a read-only portable version of Clipperz to be used when no Internet connection is available. Clipperz offline copy can also be easily moved to a USB drive.
  • Clipperz Compact – A stripped down edition designed for the Firefox sidebar. It makes “direct logins” even more addictive! And it works with Opera panels too.


phpYahtzeephpYahtzee

PHP Yahtzee is a web based single player Yahtzee game.

The object of the game is to score the most points by rolling five dice to make certain combinations. The dice can be rolled up to three times in a turn to try to make one of the thirteen possible scoring combinations.


Enjoy the holidays!

The Amahi Team

* We here at Amahi like all sorts of eclectic things and Creedance Clearwater Revival and Tina Turner comes to mind for this latest release.  CCR, (and then later Tina Turner in her smash hit in 1971) belted the amazing lyrics of “And we’re rolling, rolling on the river …” 🙂