Wake-on-LAN falls from the sky, no one injured. Go World Cup!

It was one of those brilliant things in life…

Funny things happen in FOSS communities, and Amahi is no exception!

It was a normal to quiet day on the Amahi Community Channel, when an un-named regular said:

“You know what would be cool? a “Wake” button, next to each entry in the Static IPs page.”

Wake-on-LAN (or WOL), standard that allows a computer to be magically turned on or woken up by a network message.

The community wheels really kicked into motion when other team members started searching for icons to use in the dashboard while many others tested some code. Then, before long, the team had a working platform with the new WOL feature to be released in the next update!

Amahi is taking long strides to bring your network back to the land of the free! This is but another step on our path to bring you the best that Amahi can offer!

The World cup championship is this weekend. We hate to pick sides! Really we do! But if we had to well … Our Spain supporters argued that our long term logo had been supporting the Netherlands all along with all that orange, so we decided to give a nudge to Spain for a few days πŸ™‚

Amahi-Spain

OK, we’re a bit biased, as the core team is partly formed by one spaniard πŸ™‚

So sit back, relax, and enjoy friendly competition while two great teams battle each other for the coveted World Cup Trophy!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Amahi 5.3: Storage pooling & replication, UI improvements, …

Konnichiwa!

The team has had a busy last few weeks with a small surge in growth from the FLOSS Amahi 5.3, Storage Pooling, Replication and Greyholeweekly interview and our award from Linux Format magazine, along with new features. We are proud to bring you Amahi 5.3! There are so many new features to this release that this announce should be for a 6.0!

First up, we have a wide beta release of a new disk pooling and replication technology brought by Greyhole! Amahi is the very first to integrate and release Greyhole widely and we’re proud of that. See the first of the two videos embedded below (less than 3 minutes)!

Then we have a new one-click automatic VPN tester in the Amahi control panel, a new VPN configurator for Mac OS X, deb packages for Ubuntu, plus dozens of new apps in our app store!

… and we have a little teaser video for you at the end of this post, for a new HOT app called Videos5 (also from the very prolific Guillaume, the author of Greyhole!), to encode and stream videos to your iPad, iPhone, Android devices and other HTML5-enabled browsers.Β Β  πŸ™‚

Disk Pooling and File Replication using Greyhole

Disk pooling is the hottest new function to Amahi. Disk Pooling uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives. It also allows you to create redundant copies (from 2 to whatever the max-number of disks you have in the pool) of the files you store. This can help prevent data loss if part of your hardware fails. Configure as many hard drives as you’d like to be included in your pool. You’re storage pool size will be the sum of the free space in all the hard drives you include. Your hard drives can be internal, external (USB, e-Sata, Firewire…), or even mounts of remote file systems, and you can include hard drives of any size in your pool. This is very exciting technology in Beta, so please use only with non-critical data. Hit the first video below for a short overview!

We’re Making Things Easier

  • Localization/translation improvements to 10 languages and new in this release we have the first bits of Japanese (Thanks Shingo!). This makes Amahi available in 20 languages!
  • New, much easier to install, Mac OS X VPN configuration package
  • Multiple UI improvements across the setup pages, for usability and consistency. See some eye candy
  • Installer improvements for stability and reliablity as well as usability (it suppresses some of the loud warnings)
  • App dependencies! One click installs all apps needed for one app to work!
  • A lot of updates related to building .deb packages for Ubuntu support (Thanks anzenketh!)
  • Improved calendaring, create an empty calendar on the HDA for an easy link to publishing or subscribing to calendars.
  • Get the details in the Amahi 5.3 release notes!

As usual, if you are on Amahi 5.x, you should have received Amahi 5.3 already via automatic update (unless you turned them off).

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

Video: Storage Pooling and Replication with Greyhole

Teaser for the Videos5 app in beta

Encode and stream videos to your iPad, iPhone, Android devices and other HTML5-enabled browsers.

DD-WRT, Linksys and D-Link support, enhanced UI, stability, Release 4.1 is here!

On the heels of one of our strongest releases, today we announce the release of version 4.1 of the Amahi platform!

This release added some nice features in addition to delivering a great amount of stability updates to the core and GUI updates to the user interface!New Routers Supported

Lots of testing has been done in this release by the community. And a great job at that! A very special thanks go to Mr Orange for contributing a substantial amount of the patches and fixes included!

Changes to the User Interface:

  • Add some support for Router Control for DD-WRT routers, Linksys routers, from the WRT54G series, and some D-Link models (more on router control)
  • The dashboard and setup pages now use long URLs (http://ampache.home.com) as opposed to short URLs (http://ampache), because some clients (*cough*windows*cough*) have trouble with short URLs, depending on their network configuration. Note that short URLs, a uniquely cool Amahi feature, still work, so you can still use them! Bug #274
  • Rearranging of menus in the setup area based on usability feedback, to make things run with faster response times and have more meaningful interaction – Bug #296
  • Proper support for temperature monitoring of drives when using RAID and LVM! Before, that panel would get confused when LVM or RAID were in use – Bug #8, #11, #34
  • New GUI option to change the (SAMBA) shares workgroup interactively – Bug #289
  • General stability improvements in the platform to work with apps better, better errors on bad downloads – Bug #176, #309
  • New area in the Setup -> Settings tab containing the current version of the platform and the core running (that is an FAQ after each release!)

Platform core:New Setup Area

  • New feature to allow multiple connections on the Amahi built-in VPN simultaneously
  • Introduction of a new installer, which will support things like automated installed (i.e. entirely unattended), automatic network configurations, etc.
  • Fix bug #311: making sure the DHCP server and the DNS server obey faithfully the servers settings set by the user, as well bug #313, which introduced spurious errors.
  • Add feature #308: new utility script to let the user change the network settings if they mistyped them or misconfigured them
  • Fix bug #250 and #294, which caused hdactl to not be restarted properly, causing daemonized zombie processes to be left around. Luckily this was not too harmful, as they were just sitting idle.
  • Fixed a dependency in the installer to make it easier to support the people who install with LiveCD, though it’s not really supported πŸ™‚
  • Support platform changes to manage the default DHCP lease time. For some reason, some folks need this. I know the type – those who run a tight ship. (Bug #201)
  • Add a feature to set the DHCP server default time zone properly and automatically
  • Fix an error in the installer for users whose domain/settings contained the word “error” … you know who you are πŸ™‚

If you have not updated yet to Fedora 10 and you are still on Fedora 9, here is a very nice guide from long-standing contributor Brandon Kernell how how to upgrade your distro!

Amahi 4.0 is alive! PDC, Router Control, … and more!

The Amahi team is happy to announce a major new release of the Amahi platform!

A little while in the making, with stability and usability in mind, it brings the goal is a little closer:

          Making Home Networking Simple!

In just a handful of weeks that the app gallery has been open, we have reached close to 50 apps live, over 25 apps are in beta, with over 12.000 app installs to date.

Version 4.0 of the Amahi platform (for Fedora 10 only) hit the wires yesterday. It brings support for Primary Domain Controller, a new module system to remotely control your router/firewall, ability for apps to create their own servers and shares, and more!

Read on for all the details, but before that … A Call To Action!

We get feedback that we need more marketing! We’d like to ask you, our user community, to help publicize Amahi and this new release, with your friends, in your favorite forums, in twitter (yes, we’re @amahi!), in Facebook/MySpace/FriendFeed/etc. and any other forums you like!

If you know any blog, magazine, user group or media outlet that would find it of interest to interview or otherwise report on the latest from Amahi, get in touch with the team or the community!

Now let’s get right to the new features!


Improved Dashboard and Setup

Our dashboard and setup pages have changed. The Dashboard can handle many more applications and it looks better. Under Setup, there is now a new Settings tab for controlling advanced settings and router control. There are also user interface improvements in it. When installing an application, the special instructions for that app are shown immediately.

With Advanced Settings enabled, a few other options for more sophisticated features show up under the Shares tab and the Applications tab. Router control is also under settings, as an in-development feature (shows up under networking when it’s enabled).


PDC
Welcome to the home domain
One of the most demanded feature included in this release is that you now have the capability to run your HDA as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC).

PDC allows your HDA to control the features and application permissions your users may be granted access to in their computers, with the use of a single username and password combination. It also does things like mapping/mounting all the common shares automatically. This is why it is regarded as more of an “enterprise” feature.

This is especially beneficial to small businesses, home offices, and (sophisticated) parents!

Read more on how to use the Amahi PDC feature (note that it requires the pro/business versions of Windows).


Router and Firewall Control

This feature allows you to remotely control your router or firewall from the HDA setup pages. This feature is modular (if there is a module for your router/firewall, you can control it from your HDA, with no need to forward ports manually through VPN, etc.).

This feature is under development. Popular requested modules are open-wrt/dd-wrt and UPnP.

Help us out on this feature! It only involves writing some ruby code to interface the more popular routers and firewalls.


New Application Features

Applications may come with their own server and their own share. This is so that, for example, a bittorrent downloader can put files in its own share, and run as it’s own server, and be controlled by the user! A few apps already take advantage of this, like of the most popular apps, uShare and Transmission. More will take care of this going forward, which makes things easier to use and set up!


Servers
Servers Panel

A new section under Applications allows control and monitor the various servers running in your HDA, such as uShare, DNS server, DCHP server (a long requested feature), VPN server, etc.

This means you can now more easily monitor and easily control what’s happening. Remember it’s your network! Run it like you mean it!


What else is going on, you ask?

A few popular applications are out, including one, eyeOS, which is an entire Operating System in your browser, yes you read that right!

In the development front we have …

The Ubuntu port of Amahi is in development under the guidance of @kprav33n. This is very exciting. We will need testers for the Ubuntu port pretty soon!

The Fedora 11 update is now under way, with at least two F11 machines running in testing. Fedora 11 was announced in May and it looks stable.

servertweetAnd a little native app called ServerTweet that sends alerts on disk and bandwidth usage, programs running, temperature levels via Twitter is also nearing release. Pretty cool!

Big thanks to our community and our testing group. This update went very smoothly!
We are well on our way to developing the next platform thanks to the community members Rampage537, BK, cpg, GeraldW, pjcrux, Bigfoot65 and others for the help and support!

OK, OK, we will do more frequent (and smaller!) updates! πŸ™‚

Carlos
for the entire Amahi Team and Community