Amahi 5.1: more bang, less buck!

WHAT!?!? 5.1 is here already? With fewer bugs?

You bet your knickers it is! The 5.1 release brings new and exciting enhancements to the Amahi platform,Reboot Poweroff improving on the 5.0 release (our most successful ever)!

Q: Didn’t you just release 5.0? – A: Yes!

Q: What is new in the Amahi 5.1 release?

A: Have you ever been in an airport and thought “Oh no!! I didn’t turn off the server!”  No worries! You now have the capability of shutting down (or rebooting) your HDA remotely from the dashboard! We also have fixes in user creation, DNS resolution across the VPN, a much improved diskmounter script, improvements to the installer for Amahi in the cloud (VPS – Virtual Private Servers) and more …

Amahi 5.1 also adds Portugese/Portugal support to the supported languages and improves Polish support. We also started the Japanese localization. This will make Amahi supported in 20 languages!

Check out the full list in the release notes or read below for the gory details. In the mean time, as many of you know, we have been discussing how to improve the media server features of Amahi. We continue integration testing on a DNLA server, which is proving to work quite well!

Enjoy the 5.1 release! If you have Amahi 5.0, you get 5.1 automatically. If you have Amahi 4 (Fedora 10) here is a quick guide on transitioning to Amahi 5.

The lowdown of those pesky critters fixed in the 5.1 release ..

A minor bug in the Fedora Project affected our 5.0 release as a result of Fedora 12. Namely you could only create a user with all lower case, there could not be one capital letter we filed bug 550732 though it is believed to be fixed on Fedora 13.

The DNS subsystem will support resolution over the VPN connection to your HDA (this means you can more reliably use your webapps while VPN’d into your HDA). This resolves bug 400 which has been a long standing issue. NO MORE! It’s your network and we’re making it easier for you to use it!

There is a a newly added diskmounter script (called hda-diskmount), bundled out of the box, so  it’s much easier to access than the older one in the wiki. Simultaneously, this substantially improves the way the diskmount script sets up mounts and suggests how to mount them permanently in your HDA!

It’s your network and we help you keep it that way! We have been working hard to bring you the most reliable and secure platform of a home server out there.

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Amahi and Windows 7 beta

I couldn’t resist – I signed up for the Windows 7 beta, installed it on an old workhorse desktop (2GHz, 1.5G RAM, 120G HD – Asus P4P800 motherboard).

The installation went extremely smoothly – including the drivers for my old Nvidia graphics card and my HP4600 scanner. After starting the browser (setting my search providers, turning off a whole lot of IE8 add-ins, etc) I tried accessing my Amahi home server. There wasn’t a hitch.

windows7

Accessing the Amahi shares is way faster than on XP, let alone Vista. The summary: Amahi works well with Windows 7 (though I still have to test the Amahi VPN from a Windows 7 client).

Amahi Home Server as a Workgroup Server

Today we released user requested improvements to make the Amahi home server more suitable to being a workgroup server.

Technically, we have added new features to manage shares in a way that they are group writable. Multiple users in a group can be controlled access with the features we already have, and now they can each have write access all files and folders in the share.

Users requesting this as a way of making the Amahi home server more suitable for workgroups and small businesses.

Shares OptionsIn this new release there is also a fix where web apps’ root directory gets properly changed when the user changes it in the webapp setup GUI.