Your files on the Go and new Amahi for Ubuntu!

We have some really exciting news!

Today we’re happy to announce a few cool things: mobile access to Amahi Sync files, an Android App for Amahi Sync, and (drum roll please!) a fairly stable/functional Beta release of Amahi for Ubuntu!

The team has spent the last few months revamping and strengthening the infrastructure that runs Amahi: Amahi Sync cloud storage, the dynamic DNS system, the repos, regular backups, the web site, anti-spammer fortification, etc. It’s  like painting the Golden Gate bridge or washing a large building: boring, but necessary, and as soon as you are done, it’s time to start over, at the other end!

Your files, On the Go

Amahi Sync is Amahi’s automatic cloud syncing app, with no clients to install on your devices. Amahi Sync is available to Amahi Pro and Ninja users and is backed by Amazon Web Services storage. Become a Pro or Ninja user if you are not one yet!

The new mobile interface is a response to the explosive growth of smartphones and tablets. This release makes accessing your files easy while on the go! At work, on the road, down the block or around the world, you can access your files with mobile devices like the iPhone, the iPad, and Android devices. To use Amahi Sync in mobile mode, all you have to do is to login to Amahi from a mobile device. Natively supported documents and media files will be playable on the device straight away!

To make the mobile interface easier to access, we are simultaneously releasing an Android app. This app provides direct access to Amahi Sync mobile and your files from within an app.

On iOS, the mobile web interface of Amahi Sync makes it easy add it to the home screen by holding the home button. This makes it very close to a native app, with full screen, smooth transitions and high performance. See the screenshots to the right and below!

The roadmap for Amahi Sync is:

  • Provide enhanced support in new Amahi releases for multiple folders and non-public folders
  • Make easier and easier access to your media, like integrating seamless media players
  • Make using/playing playlists directly in your device with as close to native performance as possible
  • Seamlessly access media in your HDA
Many thanks for all Pro/Ninja users who support Amahi, who help test and enhance Amahi Sync, and Shaun McCloud for lining up the bits to make the Android app a reality!

Amahi For Ubuntu

Amahi for Ubuntu

This Amahi release is out first Beta release for Ubuntu! We’re very excited about this
release. It’s based on the 32-bit (desktop or server) version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (long-term support). This release has been long in the making, led by Frans, our newest member of the Amahi core team, through numerous features to seamlessly accommodate the platform for new OSs. Go get it!
To be clear, this is very much a Beta release.

What works

We have tested a number of features to make sure they work and we have verified about 60 applications. However, there are a number of apps, which do not work yet, especially the more complex ones, that also happen to be the more popular ones. So, the base system works, the installer works, most major subsystems like DNS, DHCP, app installation, MySQL, Amahi Dashboard, server management, Greyhole, shares, networking, etc., all are reportedly working.

What doesn’t work

x86 64bit and ARM support is not yet ready, some complex apps (VPNs, DLNA servers, Videos5, etc.) do not work yet. Stay tuned as we work to release these apps live! We will update the known issues of the Ubuntu wiki page.

What’s new

The platform has a few stability bugs fixed, the version of Greyhole running is a much updated version 0.9.22.

 

We will support Amahi for Ubuntu 12.04 long term. We have decided to skip Fedora 16 and hop on to Fedora 17 (releasing in a few days) for the next Amahi release. Fedora 17 provides a LOT of new things that we will be able to leverage in our new platform, like ruby 1.9, rails 3 and many more virtualization stacks. Please voice your opinion in the forums as to what OS platforms we should take a look at. We will blog about our roadmap soon.

We hope you like the mobile interface to Amahi Sync and the new Ubuntu release!
Cheers!
Carlos, for the Amahi Team

Become a Cloud Ninja with Amahi 6 and Amahi Sync

The Amahi team is thrilled to announce Amahi 6 today!

We are also embarking in an adventure to make Amahi more successful and reach farther! We are going to offer 2 new premium accounts, with new services and support. We will make a few apps available in the Amahi App Store for a small convenience fee. About 2/3rds of the apps will remain as is, and the others would go for something like 99c to a few dollars, shared with the community and the app authors. Today we will start with our usual Free account, plus the new Pro and Ninja accounts 🙂

The first service we introduce is one that the community has been requesting for a while and we call Amahi Sync. Amahi Sync is an app that syncs files in designated shares on your HDA to a personal space online, one way from your HDA. It lets you easily backup, sync and share files in a network share, without installing any software in your client computers or other devices!

We are also introducing Server Alerts: a way to receive important notifications events related to your HDA. If you have logged in to your control panel recently, you may have seen the new alerts area! More on all this below. Back to Amahi 6!

Amahi 6.0: Reliability, Reliability, Reliability!

Amahi 6.0 brings a plethora of upgrades, reliability fixes and features, and better hardware support, courtesy of Fedora 14. Here are some of the highlights in this release (see the Amahi 6.0 release notes for all the details as well as the upgrade guide from Amahi 5/Fedora 12).

Application reliability. With HDAs distributed around the world, app installation could fail due to mirrors being down or unreachable (Sourceforge suffered a noticeable outage this past month). Amahi 6 uses a mirror system to minimize these errors down to zero. We are also in the process of building an even more robust mirror system (thanks to robbiet480 and smccloud for the efforts and server donations!).

Greyhole updates galore. The storage pooling technology in Amahi, Greyhole, is now at version 0.9. Greyhole has undergone tons of improvements and fixes, in part thanks to many in the community who really stressed it to the limits and exposed new issues. It also now uses a high-performance database as a back-end in Amahi 6, providing a 10X performance improvement in handling events!

Amahi 6.0 also introduces Anonymous/Guest share access, localize share names, and easy to manage webapp aliases (for the technical in you). It also supports (to a certain extent) upgrades from Amahi 5/Fedora 12! Check out the upgrade guide. Head on over to the Amahi 6.0 release notes for all the details!

So get your install on! Use the F14 DVD install for now, as the Express CD is being updated as we speak!

Online Synchronization, Server Alerts and Premium Plans!

The Amahi Sync and Server Alerts services (see screenshot of a server alert email to the right, below) join the very popular free VPN and dynamic DNS services, already providing reliable service for a long while.

Goal. These new plans and the recent Amahi Ready program for hardware vendors have the goal to take Amahi’s  success and extend it further and wider. In other words, we want to provide faster turn-around for features, perform rock-solid testing (we have built a small army of bots for app testing!), attract more apps (including non-open source apps), stimulate our contributors and testers (and manage the tester program properly) as well as provide professional support for these and newer services.

Many in the community have been very encouraging of this effort all along. We thank you for helping propel Amahi from a personal hobby, to the leading open source home server software used across 30+ countries and in 20+ languages.  And also having the coolest collection of media server apps and webapps!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on what services you would like to have the most. A small team of contributors have been testing Amahi Sync and we are implementing even more improvements immediately. We’re offering a 20% discount for those signing up in the next 4 weeks of this roll out!

Now what is this new Amahi Sync you ask? Amahi Sync monitors files in a share called Public (with further customizations coming soon) and it instantly synchronizes online under a subdomain of amahi.me. Amahi Sync is implemented via Amazon’s AWS services. Amahi Sync is meant for easy sharing by everyone in your network: anyone can put files in without needing to install software in client computers and devices as well as simple backup.

Quick FAQ for Amahi 6.0

  • I installed the Amahi 6 beta. Do i need to reinstall? Good news! NO need to reinstall! The update is automatic a few hours after the repos are updated, your HDA will have the latest bits!
  • Is the Express CD ready? Are all the apps ready? Nope, sorry. We are going to work on the apps and the express CD next!
  • What architectures are supported? 32bit and 64bit x86 architectures (ARM is not yet supported in Amahi 6)
  • Can I upgrade from Amahi 5: yes, with caution and patience. You don’t have to, however. Your Amahi 5 server will continue running for years if you let it run!
  • I need help installing Fedora 14! Check the Full Fedora 14 install guide, which was designed for Linux novices and WHS converts into the Amahi way. Thanks slim!

Special Thanks!

Considering how Amahi 6 got over 230 installs in just the beta, it would be hard to credit everyone who participated in Amahi 6, from ideas, to documentation, to bugfixes, to testing. However, we’d like to give a collective THANK YOU to all those who have contributed in any way, since Amahi 6 looks like a very solid release!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

[Pics by steven depolo and Mykl Roventine]

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