No, sorry. Not at this time. It may be technically feasible, however, we're a small team with limited resources.

Updated over 6 years ago

Amahi supports the following architectures:

• PCs with an x86_64 processor
• As of Amahi 8 we only support 64bit platforms. this included most if not all INTEL or AMD processors.
• Support for 32bits, marvell and other platforms have been dropped.

Updated over 1 year ago

Please see our WIKI for up to date requirements:

• Requirements

Updated over 1 year ago

For the Operating System, we recommend the default, ext4, which is a native Linux file system.

For mounting drives with your data, we also recommend ext4. However you can use many other file systems, like FAT and NTFS. These may come with some loss of functionality like permissions, file sizes or journaling.

Updated almost 6 years ago

Amahi is pronounced ah-MAH-hee - rhymes with mahi-mahi (the fish) :-)

Updated over 6 years ago

Your HDA is your Amahi Linux Home Server.

HDA stands for "Home Digital Assistant." - Like a PDA, but for the home.

We came up with the term HDA to describe what the Amahi Linux Home Server aims for. Something as simple to use as a PDA, for the home and home networking.

Updated over 3 years ago

Generally speaking, all HDA-related files are in /var/hda on your system.

Updated almost 9 years ago

Yes, you can use hardware RAID or software RAID with your Amahi server!

To be more precise, Amahi relies on the base Linux OS, on your hardware and the BIOS for RAID support. In other words, RAID is an OS, motherboard and BIOS feature.

You can find a guide for RAID on Amahi.

The Amahi team does hope to support RAID more actively in the future. If you are a RAID expert and have suggestions on how to configure it in a user-friendly way, get in touch with the team!

In short, many of our users use RAID, so, if you know how to configure and manage RAID in one of the many ways possible, you're good to go!

Updated over 7 years ago

We made a version of Amahi running Ubuntu (Amahi 6) in 2013. It was later superseded in 2014 by Amahi 7 (on Fedora, as we lost our developer to a change in lifestyle). It took a long time to find a dedicated and thoughtful developer for it. At the moment, this effort was largely stopped and Amahi 6 is currently in maintenance mode.

We thought the grass would be greener in Ubuntu, however, in fact, it was not. It was all a mirage, led by the enthusiasm of the community. In the end there were a few more issues.

• Repo issues were similar (they vanish, introduce issues with caching, etc. This is subtle, hard to explain and hard to manage at scale.
• We could not easily patch upstream, it was impossible to get the attention of anyone in the Ubuntu community, whereas in the Fedora (and CentOS) communities, they were open to receiving patches and we had multiple times where we contributed releases to packages that we had patched for our community, sometimes in record times.
• At some point we volunteered to maintain some packages that were edgier and we had expertise with and we did for a long time (passenger).
• The Ubuntu community have little interest in the Linux community at large, whereas the Fedora/CentOS community have more of a leadership position.
• Ubuntu has much less (if at all) mature (and degree of commitment) to ARM, which is something we're interested in for migrating to more power efficient hardware platforms
• The RPM system is, in the end, more mature and better documented than the APT system. More professional and better documented wins. We thought APT packages would be more polished, but in fact were harder to maintain.
• Our Ubuntu developer realized all these things and how hard it is to do in that community. He had a change in life situation and had to slow down. Later when he came back, he realized Fedora (and maybe one day CentOS) worked better for Amahi.

In short, there were not enough resources available to further support the development of an new Ubuntu port, unfortunately.

Updated over 1 year ago

Yes! Many, if not all of the Amahi users have wireless in their home networks. Typically, you turn off the DHCP server in your access point or WiFi router. This may involve putting it in "bridged" mode, depending on the model of the device.

Updated almost 7 years ago

Turning off the DHCP in your router and using the Amahi HDA's one is the recommended setup.

A lot of the benefits of having an Amahi HDA are derived from the fact that it makes networking simpler through being the DHCP and DNS server in the network. Most of our hundreds of users do this and also rely on it to be running it 24x7, so it's quite well tested.

This makes the network a first-class network, with DHCP-requested names automatically becoming DNS names within your chosen home domain, networking booting (PXE), etc., etc.

With this, we aim to not have to type IP addresses again :-)

Here are the tradeoffs if you would like to only use some of the functionality.

Updated over 7 years ago

Amahi does not currently support CentOS. There are a few people interested in Amahi for CentOS, due to the importance placed to reliability and security in CentOS. The Amahi team likes CentOS. We run most Amahi web sites on Centos and we know it well. We think are some of the issues in supporting Amahi on CentOS:

1. CentOS is permanently behind, by its very nature. This is good, in the name of stability. By the time CentOS rolls around to a new version, Amahi would have been stuck in old libraries and packages for a long long while.
2. We have tested CentOS (5 and later), however, it needs a lot of packages and infrastructure dependencies to make it work. There are dozens of small details that break apps in subtle ways, which makes it hard to support it thoroughly. There is a lot more to it than meets the eye: package names are slightly different, deps are just a little different, some files have different paths in CentOS, ....
3. There is limited support for non-x86 platforms. We would like to at least not loose ARM.
4. CentOS's focus seems to be enterprise-centric, so, many multimedia and other leading-edge libraries and packages are either not there, very old, or have subtle issues. Amahi has to walk a like between being stable and being up to date and on the leading edge. It's not a great alignment of interests with CentOS.
5. Finally, the CentOS community is ... in short ... not friendly. The Amahi community tried to interact with them and they are very abrasive. Their focus is IT and stability and not modern libraries and stacks like Ruby on Rails, etc. The Fedora and Ubuntu communities are more welcoming to Amahi. We also have been able to maintain some packages for them.

That said, we're a small community and we should not be discouraged by the above. Given sufficiently interested people willing to debug, test, develop, provide patches, test apps, etc., Amahi on CentOS can be done. If you are interested, roll up your sleeves, fork the repos and contribute!

Updated over 4 years ago

At the moment, Amahi has support for streaming to iTunes ® with an Amahi-packaged version of the Firefly media server, which also supports streaming the Roku Soundbridge. In addition, there is centralized file sharing. The application is called AmahiTunes.

Updated about 7 years ago

YES! We have a DLNA server, one of our most popular applications. We also have uShare, but it's not favored over the DLNA server, which can stream more formats and to a much larger number of devices such as the Xbox, XBMC), the Xbox360 and the Playstation 3.

Updated about 7 years ago

Amahi is a new kind of "distribution." There is no download that takes place for Amahi itself. You download a Fedora install DVD, and install. As part of the install process, the Amahi repos are added and the chosen packages are downloaded. Simple.

More details on where our code is (the repos and in git) in our Technology Section.

Updated almost 6 years ago

The system requirements start very low. Some users manage with a server running as slowly as 800MHz. Minimum disk space is about 3GB.

Updated almost 9 years ago

Amahi does not mean anything today.

However, we did check out other uses ...

There is a remote village in Northern India called Amahi. Not much else is known about it.

Also, there was an ancient tale where an emperor's son was offered two women in marriage, a beautiful woman, named Amahi, and her sister.

He chose the beautiful one, Amahi.

The person offering then said he should have kept both!

The not-so-beautiful sister was to be a longer-living woman while the beautiful one was to be short lived.

As the ancient analogy goes, ... the beautiful sister was just like flowers on trees, beautiful, with a short life. The other sister, like branches on a tree, though not so beautiful, was practical and long-lived.

There is also a theory that Amahi could have meant sweet (甘い, — "amai" phonetically) in ancient Japanese.

Updated over 4 years ago

Amahi is, at it's core, a managed server.

Our repository of software and our web site makes it easy to install and manage a server that would otherwise take many hours and days to setup.

Signing up allows you to get personalized management of your system.

Updated almost 9 years ago

No. You can optionally turn off your router's DHCP server for your LAN and let the Amahi HDA give out the DHCP leases for the systems in your network. Some people are understandably hesitant to do this, so we made it optional.

Thousands of people use the Amahi HDA as their DHCP and caching DNS server 24x7, so we have solid proof that it's reliable for continuous use. In fact many people prefer to use it because it's more reliable than their router.

You have several options:

1. Use your HDA's DHCP and caching DNS server: This is the recommended configuration to have the all the features of the apps that come with Amahi.
2. Use only your HDA's caching DNS server: To do this, change the DNS that your router gives out in the DHCP requests (or change your clients) to your HDA's IP address. By pointing your router DNS to the IP address of the Amahi HDA you will get a lot of the functionality all of the machines in your network that use it. With this setup, everything will work, except:
   • Assigning of static IPs in your network settings will not work
   • Network booting your systems from your HDA will not work.
   • Automatic DHCP naming of machines in your network will not work (the Amahi DHCP is configured to automatically allocate DNS names for machines that request their name via DHCP).
   • Your Amahi HDA-provided domain will not work inside your own network. This means short URLs will not work in this configuration. Please use the long form url (with the full domain name you chose for your network).
3. No change in DHCP or DNS in your router: You can use the desktop in your HDA and do most every features on your Amahi HDA, as the HDA will use its own DNS server. Other machines in the network will not take advantage of most features in the the Amahi HDA. They will probably see the file server in the HDA, though it may only be accessible with an IP address, not a name. The AmahiiTunes server and UPnP server may be visible to clients, however, this is not tested/supported.

Updated over 1 year ago

Yes. Amahi makes your hardware into a NAS and much more. Amahi has the typical services that a Network Attached Storage (NAS) has. WIth Amahi you have one of the most user friendly ways to configure users and shares in your network. That and much more, of course, like networking functions (no more typing an IP address) and tons of easy to install applications!

Updated almost 7 years ago

Log on to your control panel in amahi.org and you will see a link to the customized install instructions at the bottom.

Updated almost 8 years ago

Amahi does not have any "connection to the internals of your network." Amahi does not know what files you have in your system or any way to find out. The only way to "get inside" your network is via VPN, or ssh (assuming you open and forward the proper ports). That is access-controlled by the users you have created in your system.

Amahi is open source. You or anyone else can check the code in the system for any holes or any other bad behavior. There is an element of trust. We all place some trust in Fedora and RedHat when we run their software (and soon on Ubuntu/Canonical and Debian).

As well, we place trust further upstream in the open source community at large, which has built a very large portion of all Amahi and Fedora systems. The people in our contributor team are selected with care and we have a review process for the apps that come to Amahi, using a "pristine source" approach, with peer reviews from our testmasters, even being open source, to make sure there is no break in the chain of trust.

When you get closed source software you inherently trust the vendor of the software, even when they do not provide the source.

The goal of Amahi is "making home networking simple." Amahi is an unconventional "distro," with a different philosophy and a goal to make it easier to deply and use than regular distros. The core team would like nothing more than make Amahi self-sustaining and thrive. That cannot be done without trust from our users. If we attempted to break that trust would mean the end of Amahi.

The updates you get from Amahi and Fedora are open source as well and can be disabled if you want to. Our philosophy is that "it's your box, it's your network," and we just make it easy to control that.

Bugs and security issues happen. We do pay attention to those as a high priority (we did that when there were some DNS urgent issue a long while ago, where we reacted faster than even Fedora). This happens in any software.

In terms of sharing information in the server, we're very privacy conscious. You can see the privacy policy from the web site, taken from the fine folks at Wordpress, who we trust. However, note that we do not have any way to even know what's in your server. We have talked about the possibility of providing backups of some shares. If we do this, it will probably be done in an encrypted way, as we cannot really sustain any liability for any potential loss of your data.

Updated over 7 years ago

Amahi is supported in over 25 languages and locales! The languages supported are: ﺎﻠﻋﺮﺒﻳﺓ, Bahasa Indonesia, български език, Dansk, Deutsch, Ελληνικά, English, Español, Français, עברית, hrvatski, latviešu valoda", Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Nederlands, Norsk (Bokmål), Norsk (Nynorsk), Polski, Português - Brasil, Português - Portugal, română, Русский язык, suomi, Svenska and 中文.

Updated almost 4 years ago

Smoothwall is not available as a one-click install today.

In the future, it may be packaged by someone in the community, however, our philosophy is "It's your box!" so you can definitely go into your Amahi HDA and install it.

The one suggestion is to use eth1 for the WAN device, and that will probably make installation in Amahi easier.

Updated about 7 years ago

In short: to make things simple and be able to provide services for you, such as dynamic DNS, VPN and more in the future.

The vast majority of users are used to an install code and prefer a simple install code than multiple configuration settings. As we provide more things, we can add configuration settings without changes to how things are installed.

Amahi is not a conventional Linux distribution. Amahi was started with the idea of making something that would ordinarily take days or weeks to setup a matter of minutes. Amahi is in essence a "managed server".

Amahi's goal is to make networking simple. The services and applications we provide and would like to provide in the future

Updated almost 7 years ago

Absolutely!

The majority of Amahi apps are LAMP apps. So, all the components to run LAMP apps are present in Amahi from the get go!

In addition, Amahi provides a most excellent development environment for LAMP as well as all the other major frameworks like RoR (Amahi itself if built in RoR), Python, etc. etc.

Wether you do it as a hobby, for learning or professionally, Amahi is a great development environment for the most up to date technologies.

Updated over 6 years ago

This error is an indication of two possible things: a) your HDA does not have network connectivity b) you installed an unsupported version of Amahi.

If you have network connectivity, it may be that you installed a version of Amahi that is too old or too new. Amahi usually stays a bit behind new major releases, due to stability considerations and also due to the development team being small.

Updated over 6 years ago

There is no good way to do this, unfortunately, so it's not officially supported. The domain information gets populated all over the place in configuration files as your HDA gets used. The best solution is to reinstall.

However, if you just installed and have no apps installed or have not done much, you can probably get away with it by doing these steps, only for advanced users:

• Uninstall all apps and themes
• Create a new profile in your control panel with the same settings, but with the new domain. This will give you a new install code.
• In your HDA, bring up a terminal with root access (or ssh into your HDA if you do not have console).
• Remove a file with this: rm /etc/sysconfig/amahi-hda
• Run this command: hda-new-install -f NEWINSTALLCODE (replacing the NEWINSTALLCODE with your new install code you obtained above)

Again, this is not really fully supported.

Updated over 6 years ago

Amahi emails are sent with dual signatures. Most likely the email was sent out successfully. Here are some ideas and how to re-generate the activation email.

• Did you check your spam folder?
• Did you accidentally delete it?
• Does your provider reject emails with unique links?

If you would like to re-send the activation email, you can do so by entering your email in the forgot password page and your will receive an email with your activation link (or your reset password link if you somehow already activated).

Otherwise please contact support for help.

Updated over 6 years ago

If you are using the same hardware, the best way is to simply copy the data out to an external drive or some other storage, then install Amahi fresh and copy the data to it, via USB or network.

If you are using different hardware, the best way to do this is by installing Amahi then copying the data over the network.

Updated over 6 years ago

Amahi is not a traditional OS distribution. It's a connected OS expandable with a large collection of apps throughout the lifetime of the system.

Registration automatically sets up the proper API keys without concerning the user with technical gory details, pre-configures the system and makes it easy for people to customize and guide the experience step-by-step. Much like most OSs for smart phones and smart devices.

Updated over 6 years ago

Not any more! The Amahi release based on Fedora 14 is in in maintenance mode.

Updated about 3 years ago

There are two main username systems related to Amahi:

• The user (or email) in amahi.org and it's password. This is reset via email. This username is not case sensitive, though the password IS case sensitive
• The user in your server and its password. Fedora asks you to make one user during install and after that, that same username is used to fully create the first user in Amahi. These usernames and passwords are case sensitive.

These are two different systems. Your server is your server and cannot be reset by anyone but you, being logged in.

What you say can be interpreted as saying that one does not allow you to get into the other, which is right.

Updated about 6 years ago

Amahi credit can be purchased at the buy credit page. You need to be logged in to your account to apply the credit to it.

Updated almost 5 years ago

No. Fedora 15 has major changes to the underlying distribution. That can mean instability, which is a major no-no in Amahi.

We may wait until Fedora 16 comes along, hence skipping Fedora 15 support.

Updated almost 6 years ago

The money goes to make Amahi self-sustaining, release faster, provide higher quality releases and apps, provide better support, and ultimately, grow faster.

There are several priorities for Amahi:

• One of the main priorities is to make Amahi self-sustained. We have mostly reached that stage, where we can pay our bills every month.
• Another priority is provide enough value to be able to hire the Amahi team full-time.
• Other priorities are to foster open source apps and support worthy projects and organizations aligned with Amahi's goals.

Amahi supports EFF, FSF, Mozilla, as well as a closely related project, Greyhole.

We use the Amahi income to pay the bills. We have bills for hosting, backups, domains, certificates, subscriptions, attending events, etc.

Updated almost 5 years ago

In your control panel, there is an area for your account, as the second menu on the left. It shows your account type (Free, Pro or Ninja) and the account balance. Clicking on that will take you to a page where you can enter the new email

Updated almost 5 years ago

To change your password, you can go to the password change page, input your email and you will receive a password reset link in a few minutes. If you are logged in, it's best to log out first. Check your spam folder in case it landed there!

Updated almost 4 years ago

There are at least two elements to this: power and speed.

Generally, Amahi is meant to be long running. In that sense, it's power efficient to be in SSD. However, having only one SSD drive is not that efficient if a bunch of other disks are also spinning in the system. They have to be power-managed for the system to be efficient. If the other drives are green and power-managed so that they are efficient, then an SSD will play well.

The second point is speed. Generally, booting will be much faster with an SSD OS disk. Hower there will be limited benefit from SSD if you have enough memory to hold Amahi and the OS. Since Amahi and Linux is meant to have a fairly small memory footprint, this is not a high bar. Since Amahi is not meant to be rebooted often, having an SSD is of limited value for making a speedy boot.

Overall, it's nice to have SSD if you can afford it. It will become more and more affordable over time, so it's clearly the future!

Updated almost 5 years ago

Unfortunately, we cannot support this request yet, for technical reasons. The nickname gets propagated through a number of settings and files and it's hard to change automatically once it's set. The closest solution is to stop your HDA, delete your account and reinstall your HDA under a new account.

We stated the following in the signup form (admittedly not everyone realizes that): The username determines your free Dynamic DNS and it's the basis for the nickname of your Amahi HDA (used for the free VPN). It will also be used for your subdomain in Amahi Sync™ cloud storage (if you use it).

Updated over 3 years ago

Purchases of Amahi Credit are not refundable. If you think there has been a mistake or an error in a purchase, let us know by contacting the support email and we can try to reach an agreement to make an exception.

Updated over 4 years ago

Nope. We wish. There may not be technical limitations, however there are some non-technical limitations on how ZFS may be bundled with a Linux system. If these clear one day, we will definitely want to run ZFS file systems within Amahi!

Updated about 4 years ago

It's possible the system we use to detect spammers is erroneously flagging your system for spamming. This happens to less than 0.5% of our prospective users. Here are some possible reasons:

1) Perhaps you are using a system that has a virus in it that is sending or has sent spam previously, probably unbeknownst to you. Or it could be part of a spam bot army.

2) Another possibility is if you are connecting from a network that uses a proxy or a VPN and someone in that same proxy/VPN was identified as sending spam (hence the proxy/VPN is labeled as a spammer). Try another connection.

3) Yet another possibility is that you are using a shared computer that has been identified in the past as a source of spamming.

Contact support (at this domain) to indicate this and we will sign you up right away. Apologies.

Updated over 1 year ago

We release on our own cycle, updating the platform periodically.

Updated over 1 year ago

It's a group of symptoms that collectively indicate or characterize an Amahi user as a technical expert. Amahi is designed with regular humans in mind. Many expert users often bypass certain steps or set things up in unusual ways that mainstream users would probably never set up. Examples: unusual network devices, active/aggressive reverse firewalls, VLANs, complex network setups, etc., etc. We often see the situation where users afflicted with Expertitis get more in trouble than regular users and they throw their hands in the air because Amahi did not handle it well. We say that this user is suffering Expertitis. It's not meant to be derogatory, but rather that the users' expertise takes the situation outside the envelope of what Amahi can typically handle.

Updated over 3 years ago

No, Amahi is not a router and it absolutely requires a separate firewall to be between the Amahi server's network and the Internet at large. Amahi is designed to be in a more-or-less trusted environment like a home network. You should definitely have a separate firewall isolating your network from the Internet. Typically, the firewall is in your router/gatweay/modem. Your Amahi HDA should definitely not be reachable directly from the Internet (only if you did some port forwarding in your firewall).

Updated about 3 years ago

Someone in your sam domain may have marked our emails as unsolicited, and in some cases, ISPs or email providers take actions to block our emails without telling us or providing a way for us to unblock them.

We try very hard to keep our reputation very high so that our email works well. We are not a source of unsolicited email and we have a simple way to unsubscribe. However, some people still mark our email as spam.

Notably, outlook/live.com/hotmail seem to not provide a simple way for us to unblock their services. We have proof that emails to them get delivered from us to them, just not to users.

We think we've found a solution for Outlook/Hotmail/Live users:

On the outlook page go to Options, then Right column, then Safe and blocked senders, then Add @amahi.org. It should work!

Updated 4 months ago

Yes. Though that may or may not be what you mean.

Amahi provides mobile apps for streaming content in your server. These apps are operated from phones or tablets, using their touch screen.

Amahi provides mobile apps for streaming content in your server. These apps are operated from phones or tablets, using their touch screen. There are also other mobile apps that can be used with Amahi, like Samba clients or even things like the VLC player. In addition, Amahi is meant to be used via a web browser. If you use that browser from a device using a touch screen, it's largely transparent.

The Amahi server (and the hardware) do not require a monitor, except during the initial installation. This is known as a "headless" server.

Updated over 1 year ago

Yes, this is required. The reason is that being both the DHCP and DNS server, it's best to keep it always at a single static IP to prevent dependencies and race conditions between them.

Updated over 6 years ago

Yes! It's your network! :-)

Check this other question for more details on what to chose.

Updated about 8 years ago

We support this. If a site that exists in the internet is masked by the fact that you have that name in your network, we have the capability to add a hole, so that you access it. For instance, I have my network as example.com, however, I want to be able to access www.example.com. Please ask in the user mailing list how to do this, as it involves manual tweaking.

Updated almost 9 years ago

Yes! You can have your very own top level domain! :-)

Updated almost 9 years ago

We recommend a short domain. It's cute and it saves typing and electrons.

Do's and don'ts:

• Don't use a dynamic DNS domain. These are really for use externally, not in your home network! (besides, you get a free, zero-configuration dynamic DNS address externally with your Amahi HDA install)
• Don't use the same domain you get your email at^*.
• Don't use a long domain. Shorter makes your networking simpler.
• Do feel free to use a vanity domain or one that does not exist on the Internet at large

Domains are restricted to containing letters, numbers, dashes and underscores.

We default to using home.com for your home DNS domain. That means your machines at home will be part of this DNS domain.

For instance, if you have an iPhone and a vaio computer, they will come up as iphone.home.com and vaio.home.com.

Note that this choice has no bearing with things as seen from the outside of your home network.

From inside, you will "own" that domain in your network and will not be able to see anything from that domain outside of your network. So we recommend you choose a domain that you

• Don't care about seeing it from your network^*, and/or
• Does not exist

^*There is one way for advance users to still see some machines outside of the network that use the same domain, by "punching a hole" in the DNS server.

Updated about 8 years ago

We recommend by default to be 10 but anything up to 99 should do.

We do not recommend using IPs 100 and above because that's the range that the HDA uses to give out dynamic DHCP leases. We may change this in the future to make it more flexible.

Updated over 6 years ago

In order to get up and running out of the box, you should supply the configuration of your network. If you are like most people, you have a router/modem in your network, and that provides the network settings for the rest of the network. The IP address for the gateway is typically one of:

• 192.168.1.1
• 192.168.0.1
• 192.168.1.1
• 192.168.0.254
• 10.10.10.10

The simplest way to figure those settings are to look for the settings you have in a computer connected to your network. Under Windows XP/Vista you can do this with:

ipconfig /all

In Mac OS X, go to System Preferences, Network, and look in the Router field.

In Linux, we don't have to tell you :-)

route

and look at the Gateway column for the default route.

Updated almost 9 years ago

This is not currently supported. The reason is that the domain name is propagated across a number of settings in the system and at this time we do not have code to update all those.

Updated almost 8 years ago

If you know what you are doing, you can install a swap file, however, for most people, we recommend you install a swap partition. The installer is a little bit conservative. If you have a lot of memory, you can limit your amount of swap, unless you really plan to run memory-intensive tasks. It all comes down to how heavily you want to use the machine.

Updated about 9 years ago

Yes!

You can use LVM in your Amahi server. In fact some of our users like it!

Note that using two or three more drives will double or triple your chances of having a file system catastrophe due to a hardware failure. This is why LVM is often combined with RAID

LVM (Logical Volume Manager) is convenient for keeping multiple drives, very common nowadays, viewed as a single drive. However, unless you are familiar with LVM, we tend to nor recommend it due to the risk that one drive's failure makes it difficult to recover the data from the other.

We recommend this article on managing disk with LVM for a quick overview, if you want to learn more about it.

Updated about 9 years ago

You have to run hda-install in the full root environment: either "su -" or logging in as root directly.

Doing "su" only is not enough, as it does not provide the full root environment, in particular it does not have /usr/sbin in the path.

Updated about 9 years ago

No, it just needs to be in your home network and accessible by all other systems. In particular, you do not want to make it available outside (on the WAN) of your network completely. If you do want to access your HDA server from the outside, we recommend that you only open the ports that you need, through your router, and forward them to your HDA (e.g. VPN, game server, web server, ssh, etc.).

Updated about 9 years ago

Yes. Many people do this for multiple reasons. Amahi is designed to run headless. However, it's up to your system BIOS and OS settings to achieve this. First boot without a keyboard and make sure your system boots without problems. It may need a keyboard unless a “halt on errors” is disabled. There may also be a setting for whether the system boots or stays powered off when the power goes out. It's usually called something like “Restore n AC Power Loss.” We like it on or “same as before”, so that the server is always up. See our other recommendations on how to set up the server.

Updated about 9 years ago

To update the HDA apps installed you can reinstall them. Execute the following from a command prompt on the HDA, when you are logged in as root:

yum -y install 'hda-app*'

Updated about 9 years ago

Yes -- Amahi has been setup to run on VMware, though we do not make a pre-built VMware appliance 'image' available at the moment.

Many people also use VirtualBox, Virtual PC or Proxmox to play with Amahi before running their server on real hardware.

Updated over 1 year ago

When the applications are installed on the HDA, or new applications updated, sometimes the Apache server needs to be restarted. This can be done from the command prompt on your HDA (as root):

service httpd restart

Updated about 9 years ago

If you use rpm or yum to install the Amahi Linux Home Server and you are behind a proxy, you may need to set the proxy specifically for those programs.

• For rpm, you will need to use the options --httpproxy HOST and maybe --httpport PORT
• For yum, you may have to do export http_proxy=HOST:PORT in /etc/yum.conf or from the command line before using yum by hand. See this article to learn more about yum and proxy servers.

Updated about 9 years ago

We DO NOT recommend you apply all updates before the Amahi install. The reason is that we test more heavily against the FULL DVD of the distro.

We should note that due to stability considerations, we turn off all non-Amahi automatic updates that the system has. We don't want unsuspecting users to be unpleasantly surprised by updates that happen behind the scenes. You can (and should periodically) update.

The Amahi updates are, on the other hand, automatic. We thoroughly test our updates and we make sure they are compatible with upstream packages from the base distribution.

Updated over 7 years ago

If you install and boot to the desktop before installing Amahi, there are utilities in the desktop to check for updates. This can interfere with the last stage of the Amahi install process. To interrupt that yum update, you can do:

    killall -HUP yum-updatesd

If that does not work, the big hammer approach may:

    killall -KILL yum-updatesd

Updated almost 9 years ago

Nope

As of Amahi 8 we stopped releasing for x86 32-bits systems to focus on supporting 64-bits systems only. 32-bits systems are becoming less and less common, as they are a legacy platform and require almost double the work from us.

Updated over 1 year ago

No, there is no client needed or anything to install.

The installer takes care of configuring all aspects of your Amahi system. In the Amahi spirit to make this as simple as possible, there is no need to further configure any software client!

Updated over 8 years ago

This is not recommended and it's not officially supported. Only eth0 is supported at the moment. However, we're starting to capture what it takes to run on a secondary controller such as eth1. Some apps may bind themselves to eth0. If you find such an app, please report it to the team as a bug or in that wiki page.

Updated almost 6 years ago

During the installation of Fedora, you are asked to create a user. Make sure you use this user to login for the first time to reset this user for Amahi. Also, make sure this user is an Administrator!

Pay attention to capitalization. Usernames in Amahi are case sensitive, so Thomas and thomas are different.

Updated over 1 year ago

When the applications are installed, most of them also install a DNS name, which we usually call a "short name", like http://blog, also aliased to your full domain, like blog.home.com.

If you click on one app link and it does not work, most likely, your client is not using your HDA for DNS.

To do that, you can force your client to use your HDA for DNS, or, more easily, you can turn off your router's DHCP server and then restart your clients.

You can also release and renew the lease if your client if you know how do do that. In Windows, you type in a command window: ipconfig /release then ipconfig /renew.

Updated over 6 years ago

For simplicity sake the system OS partitions are: 1) /boot 2) swap 3) / (root)

• boot should be 500MB
• swap should be 1 to 2 times the size of your RAM
• root should be at a minimum 10GB
• the partitioning process at install will try to create a large /home. We do not recommend that. For Amahi, the large content is best served in /var/hda/files

LVM is optional, but not required. The Amahi team does not recommend LVM in general because the complexities introduced exceed the value introduced.

Updated over 3 years ago

For those with the desire to mirror with greyhole, you "should" have 3 minimum partition mounts as follows ...

1. /var/hda/files (with Greyhole ON, this is known as the LZ -- landing zone -- and this partition doubles as storage for shares that you choose NOT to enable with Greyhole)
2. /var/hda/files/drives/drive01
3. /var/hda/files/drives/drive02

With Greyhole ON, these 2 drive## partitions point each to a physical drive and are used by Greyhole to mirror selected folders that are greyhole enabled.

Note that partition 1 above, does not need to be on a separate drive, but it is beneficial.

It should also be noted that if doing this in a virtual-machine environment, much of the physical concepts above, go out the window.

Updated over 3 years ago

With no Greyhole mirroring, the choice of drives and partitions for handling your data storage is entirely up to you, but consider these points ...

• If you ever intend on using greyhole, you should mount shares within the /var/hda/files directory. Individual drives still benefit from being mapped as /var/hda/files/drives/drive00, /var/hda/files/drives/drive01, /var/hda/files/drives/drive02 etc..
• If you decide against ever using greyhole, your storage drives/partitions may mount anywhere, but it's advised to follow as similar structure as above
• Do not mount data storage within the OS drive mount points (/boot, swap, /, /home, etc)

Updated over 3 years ago

This is very common. Your client device is not using your HDA for DNS.
You achieve that by stopping all other DHCP servers (typically one, in your router) and then restart the network on your client. For example, you reboot it, or just stop WiFi (or unplug the network cable) and start it up again.
This will ensure that your client uses your HDA for DNS.

Updated over 2 years ago

Yes. As Amahi became more and more popular, we brainstormed and asked the community how to get Amahi supported in a way that works for all.

Eventually we decided to put more effort behind Amahi and embark in effort to make Amahi more successful and reach farther. We decided to offer services that the community requested and charge for them. These in addition to the free services we have offered for a long time (VPN, dynamic DNS, server alerts and more).

After a lot of discussion with the community we also decided to make a few apps available in the Amahi App Store for a small one-click install convenience fee.

The expectation is that at any time, about 2/3rds of the apps will not have this one-click install fee, and the others would have it. As for the fee, we asked and what emerged was that people felt happy to go for something like $99c to a few dollars.

This fee is not paying for the app code, but for the distribution, maintenance and the support we provide for it, from the forums to email. It's for all the work that goes on to make it all available in something as simple as one click.

Some of the apps are open source or free. Some users question is this is OK for open source apps. It not only is OK, it's encouraged by the Free Software Foundation. See this article about selling free software. The whole point is that we do not restrict any user's freedom, but enhance the experience of using open source and free software.

Updated over 3 years ago

Yes. At this time, the success of the app is shared back with contributors in the form of Amahi Credit. This includes both apps with a one-click fee and apps without a one-click fee.

A more successful app will result in more Amahi Credit towards the contributor.

Updated over 3 years ago

Yes. App authors can add one-click convenience fees to the app that go directly to them. We have agreements with a few of the authors of the apps and we hope to attract more app authors to the Amahi App Store. If you are an app author (existing app or new app) and would like to claim your app in the App Store please get in touch via email with support (at) this domain.

Updated over 3 years ago

Generally, no. Once you buy an app, it's available to be install in your HDAs no matter how many times you reinstall or upgrade.

Updated over 3 years ago

Once you buy an app you can uninstall and re-install it any number of times.

You should not need to reinstall, however: any problems should be reported as a bug or via email with support.

Minor release updates for apps are free with the apps (one-click fee or not).

Updated over 3 years ago

Not at the moment. Amahi does try to provide all the information possible on the app, including the source, in it's app page. You could try to install it and then keep it or get the Amahi app and let the Amahi team maintain keep up with the app for you.

Updated over 3 years ago

Generally, no. Amahi does not have provisions for doing this automatically. Amahi does try to provide all the information possible on the app, including the source, in it's app page. However, please write to support explaining how the situation is not working for you. We will try to help you and we will decide if a refund is due.

Updated over 3 years ago

Based on previous experience releasing app updates can range from a few minutes or a few hours or a few days. Keeping apps relatively up to date is one of the advantages of using Amahi.

Depending on the load that the team has and how active the packager of the app is, it may take from a few hours up to a few weeks.

In addition of the load of the team/packager, it all depends on how serious the issue is and how fast the team learns about the update. If it's serious, an update is usually released quickly.

Note that the above does not refer to Amahi platform security updates (which take priority over app updates).

Updated over 3 years ago

Amahi subscriptions are managed via PayPal.

To pause, cancel, upgrade or downgrade your subscription to Amahi premium plans, go to your PayPal account.

PayPal calls subscriptions "Subscription Profiles" in English (we don't know what they call it in other languages). You can reach this area (depending on your account) inside the "My Account" tab under the "Profile" area. This works for most PayPal users, however, if you have features like a merchant account, it may be in a different location.

Updated over 3 years ago

You simply type 'hda' in the URL bar of any machine in your network. This will take you to the HDA Dashboard. That is the short form of http://hda, from there, you will be able to use the wiki, calendars, your apps, etc.

You can access your wiki by typing 'wiki' in any URL bar in any machine of your network.

For backups, you simply boot your machines over the network and choose backup or restore.

Updated about 9 years ago

This is a known issue with md-daapd (the Firefly media server). It is known non-issue, to be more precise, because the Firefly media server gets restarted successfully later after boot.

The mt-daapd server requires avahi* (for service discovery), however, the upstream packager decided to make it startbefore avahi*, which makes it exit with an error.

The Amahi Linux Home Server incorporates a monitor that checks all servers periodically and restarts them if they crash. so mt-daapd gets restarted later, this time successfully because avahi* is running already.

* avahi, not to be confused with Amahi, is a network dicovery daemon.

Updated over 8 years ago

Yes! This is an advanced feature that technical users love.

Generally, there are a lot of security issues one has to deal with if you want to host your own apps. Amahi cannot possibly help with that beyond warning about that.

At any rate, you can see how to host a web site in our wiki.

Updated over 6 years ago

Yes. Go to Setup --> Networking --> Static IPs.

Generally speaking, your Amahi HDA has a modern DHCP and DNS server, with dynamic DNS. This means that any machine that requests a name (e.g. AppleTV) will be known in your network with that name, e.g. appletv.home.com (if home.com is your home domain).

Updated over 7 years ago

Question continues: now when I do that it opens a browser of the HDA web page, Wiki, etc.!

Yes, however, it's the other 'slash'. Network drives in Windows use the backslash form, not forward slash. I.e. \\hda. See the Storage and file sharing file page in our wiki.

Updated about 9 years ago

You can use your HDA as a print server. Our wiki has a guide on making your Amahi HDA a print server.

Amahi uses the features in the base Linux distro for that. See some more generic help here.

The general procedure is:

Install the drivers for your windows and mac machines first. You may need to plug in the printer to your windows machines first to get the drivers to even load.

Plug the printer into your Amahi HDA, configure it with the desktop printing admin tool and make sure it works (if your system is headless, use VNC).

Under samba, export the printer (this should be the case in your HDA). Also, make sure CUPS is running.

Then, in your windows machines or macs, add a network printer. You should be able to browse one from your HDA, and print a test page.

Updated over 8 years ago

Note that a few of the benefits of your HDA will not work if you disable DHCP on your server. It's not recommended. Your clients should be using your server DNS for apps to resolve correctly..

The DHCP server in the HDA can be stopped by doing this:

• First go to the Setup --> Settings and turn on Advanced settings
• Then go to the Network --> Settings and turn off DHCP server

Here are the tradeoffs if you would like to only use some of the functionality.

In short, a few of the nicer features of your HDA will not be available. You can still point your machines to the DNS server in the HDA and get some of the benefits, like nice URLs for your HDA-provided services. This is not a supported configuration for things like Amahi Netboot.

Updated over 3 years ago

With Amahi, only one service requires opening ports and forwarding them, and that is the VPN, one of Amahi's most popular features. We recommend this guide which illustrates port forwarding for many popular routers.

Updated almost 9 years ago

In Windows XP, some computers vanish from the "My network places" after 12 minutes.

This is due to the "Windows firewall / Internet connection sharing" functionality.

Even turning the Windows firewall off does not allow you to see the rest of the systems in your network. The "Windows firewall/ Internet connection sharing" service will still be running. Here is how to disable it:

Open Control panel / Administrative tools / Services. Scroll down until you find "Windows firewall/ Internet connection sharing". Right click on it and select properties. In the dialog select "Startup type:" disabled. You might stop the service as well on this dialog, (presumably it is running). You don't need to reboot to make the change effective.

Read more about the "Microsoft Computer Browser" stack

Updated about 8 years ago

As long as the VLAN is managed so that the network where Amahi is running looks like a local network, Amahi should work as in a local network.

Amahi does not manage VLANs itself.

Updated about 6 years ago

Some modems/routers from ISPs and some Apple devices make it really hard or impossible to turn off DHCP and/or DNS.

One alternative some of our users have found is to simply put a small/cheap router with NAT in between the modem and the rest of the network. That way you control what's inside via this router. The WAN side goes to the router/modem, and the rest of the network goes to what was before connected to the router.

A small downside is that port forwarding requires two forwards because there are two NATs. Now, if the router/modem has a setting for doing DMZ ... you can find what the WAN side port got for an IP (connect a laptop directly to the modem or the router), and hit the admin page, the status will tell you.

Once you know the IP of the WAN port _in the router_, not the modem, set that to DMZ in the modem.

WAN side of the modem or cable coax
     |
 [Modem]
     |
     |              LAN port of the modem (e.g. 192.168.0.*)
     |
     |              WAN port of the router
 [router]          e.g. ddwrt, with NAT
     | | |
     | \ \
     |  |  \

  rest of your network ... e.g. 10.10.10.* or 10.1.1.* to keep your sanity

Updated over 3 years ago

This is one of the most common questions. The overwhelmingly likely cause for this is that your client computer or device is not getting its DNS from your HDA. Once your HDA is up and running, the simplest way to solve this is this

• Stop all other DHCP servers on your network (typically there is a DHCP server in your router servicing your LAN)
• Make sure you reboot your devices. We don't like this, but it's simple. You could also try to turn off networking (e.g. wifi) and turn it back on, so that your device gets a new DHCP lease from your HDA

This is a very common issue with new installations. Many devices really like to retain old DHCP leases (from the LAN router, typically), so they need to be forced into your new network provider, your HDA, and this is best done through a reboot.

Updated about 3 years ago

It could well be that some other DHCP server (the router, typically) was not turned off and it's still delivering some leases to clients. If a client gets a lease from some other DHCP server, it may appear that things are not working as expected. The solution is to turn off all other DHCP servers.

Updated 6 months ago

By default, the machines in your network will see \\hda in Windows Explorer and the Finder in the Mac, however, they won't accept a username and password. At the moment we do not support configuring your samba users and shares from your HDA's setup dashboard. This is best done from the desktop, through either the console, if you have a monitor and keyboard, or through VNC. See the wiki section on storage and file sharing.

Updated about 9 years ago

Depending on which settings one chooses during install, the Samba desktop configuration tool may or may not be available. If you don't see it, and until this is automated, please use this command to install it: yum install system-config-samba This command should be run as root (directly or with sudo).

Updated about 9 years ago

No, the user should be a plain user name, without a prefix.

Some versions of windows will attempt to put a prefix like XP-PC\user - just use user.

Updated over 8 years ago

Not at this time. There is no way to limit the size a share can take.

Updated almost 7 years ago

A share is a pointer. Shares provide access to data.

Adding, moving or deleting a share does not touch data at all.

Updated over 6 years ago

Yes. However, it depends how you have the folder is shared. If you share the folder before it in the hierarchy then you may see the files, otherwise you may need to enable hidden folders and files on the client os to see the things inside it.

Updated over 6 years ago

Amahi uses Samba, which is a top notch file server. There is no general answer for this, because are many factors involved in a network transfer, for example:

• Type of network (10/100/1000 wired, wireless, etc.)
• speed of the drives involved
• client OS used
• cables used (cat4, cat5, cat6)
• switches or hubs used
• chipset used by the clients and the server

On a typical home network with a 1000Mbps network you may expect to get around 11MB/s (megabytes per second) reads and about 10MB/s writes.

Updated almost 6 years ago

The users you create are granted VPN access. The same credentials are being used for file access, VPN access (and ssh access).

Updated over 6 years ago

Amahi Sync is cloud storage for your HDA. It allows you to store, sync, and share certain shares on the cloud transparently.

Amahi Sync is an app and it's available to Amahi Premium subscribers.

Amahi Sync cloud storage is hosted in Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Find out more at the Amahi Sync wiki page.

Updated over 1 year ago

Amahi Sync cloud storage is hosted in Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Updated about 6 years ago

Your files are stored both on your shares and on Amahi's servers. All files are kept securely on Amazon Web Services. You can find more information about Amazon AWS.

The files are transmitted with state-of-the art encryption to Amahi's cloud servers. Only Amahi Team members that need to service these servers have (encrypted, key based) access to them. Note that there is no mechanism for Amahi Sync to receive files, only upload files from shares that have been deemed subject to Amahi Sync. This provides a more secure environment for your HDA.

Learn about Amazon S3™s security measures on the Amazon website.

Amahi Sync at the moment only supports files in the Public share. By definition this lets you get public links to those files, even though the files are unlisted. The only way for someone to access these files are that a) you give them a link to it or b) someone guesses the link to the file.

Files from different users have different locations and are separated by DNS-based names, each in a virtual host belonging to each user. This helps in separating user areas, because one area is not reachable from another.

Updated over 1 year ago

1. With direct access to the console, simply choose the username root
2. If you are already logged in as another user enter su - to change the current session to the root user
3. Use PuTTY or a similar utility to remotely login to the HDA

Updated about 9 years ago

For a comprehensive explanation for setting up VNC on your HDA.

The basic steps are:

1. Setup VNC server on the HDA
2. Set the VNC user's access password
3. Start the VNC service on the HDA
4. Access the machine using VNC viewer

Updated about 9 years ago

You do not need to do anything to update your Amahi home server. Automatic updates are enabled by default for the Amahi-only parts of the system.

This is the update policy in Amahi:

• Amahi updates are automatic. Major security updates from the base distribution will also be made available for automatic updates
• OS updates are not enabled automatically. This is for stability reasons. We don't discourage users from updating, however, we do not have the resources to test these, so things could break!

This seems to work well and we received good feedback on it, users like it.

We do try to make sure we keep reasonably up to date with the upstream distribution to make sure updates do not break anything in Amahi, however, that's something of a race, so if you update and notice something strange with Amahi, please report it (file a bug, or in the forums), indicating that you updated.

Updated over 3 years ago

We try to support the system for a long time. Many of our users run Amahi for years in a row. We care about continuous reliable operation.

This is our typical release cycle. When we make a new release, the previous release goes into "maintenance mode". That means we do not typically do any more major or minor releases to the platform or other packages, unless there is a security update that really could compromise user's systems. This is rare in our experience (only once in a few years). We will be in this mode for one or two years, until the base OS reaches its end-of-life.

App updates may trickle down for a release in maintenance mode and slowly taper over months until our entire focus for apps is in the latest release.

Updated over 3 years ago

Apps are typically in either in Alpha, Beta, or Live states, per OS platform. Alpha means the app is either not working well or very broken. This is how the life of an app starts. Beta means it's working at least for one or two people who have tested it. Live means the app should work and it's expected to install reliable and work reliable for all platforms that it's live.

Updated over 4 years ago

For a given platform, the app has to have been reported working by more and more collaborators or testers. The Amahi testmasters are the ones who do, releases, under advise from the app packager and the app collaborators. This is based on a "chain of trust concept." Generally, the Amahi team does not openly trust someone very new to the community. We are thankful to the Amahi users that have put the trust in us to run their HDA. We in turn build trust with packages over time and the end Amahi user expects us to maintain that trust with them. Ultimately, the user expect things to work and as we build trust over time, we take the input from the app packagers and contributors to make a call in changing the state of an app.

Updated over 4 years ago

The app contributors can update apps as often as common sense dictates. We tend avoid updating apps too quickly. The main reason is no other than the team is small, so we cannot get things checked fast enough. Our team keeps tabs on various releases of apps over time and we try to keep up. Ultimately, the app packagers and contributors help package and update apps.

Updated over 4 years ago