FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

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

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.

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

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!

Now, this is a FAQ if there is one!

We're interested in supporting Ubuntu. However, we need help in doing so, since we're shorthanded and we started with Fedora ...

If you are interested in helping, check out the wiki page on Ubuntu for the latest status of the Ubuntu port and stop by the IRC channel to discuss!

Yes, all you have to do is turn off the DHCP server in your access point or WiFi router. Many of our users have wireless in their home networks.

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.

We do not currently support CentOS, however, there are a few people interested in Amahi for CentOS, due to the importance placed to reliability and security in CentOS. We have tested CentOS 5.1, however, it needs a lot of packages and infrastructure dependencies (related to Ruby on Rails) to make it work. We do hope that one day soon it can be supported. If you would like to contribute, please grab the git repo with the source code and get it touch!

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.

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.

Amahi is a new kind of open source distro. There is no manual download that takes place for Amahi itself. You download a Fedora install DVD (or CD-ROMs), 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.

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

Amahi does not mean much in the real world now.

However, we did check out the Kojiki definition ...

The Emperor's son (the Emperor was regarded as God!) 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 mean sweet (amai) in ancient times.

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.

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
   • PBA (Personal backup assistant) will work, except you will not be able to network boot your systems. Use the SystemRescueCD boot option.
   • 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.

We skipped Fedora 11!

Yes. Amahi has tye 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 home server. That and much more, of course, like networking functions (no more typing an IP address) and tons of applications!

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

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

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.

Fedora 12 is the only supported distribution at this moment!

Amahi is supported in about 20 languages and locales! The languages supported are: Bahasa Indonesia, български език, Dansk, Deutsch, Ελληνικά, English, Español, Français, Italiano, 한국어, Nederlands, Norsk (Bokmål), Norsk (Nynorsk), Polski, Português - Brasil, Português - Portugal, Русский язык, Svenska, 中文.

This is not strictly required, but very much recommended. 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.

If you configured a dynamic IP address for your primary HDA network interface and you want to make it static, the best way to achieve this is by running

        setup

Yes! It's your network! :-)

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

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.

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

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.

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 (if you think we should and have a good reason, please speak up).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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*'

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

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

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.

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.

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

Yes!

On new versions of the base distribution we usually support 32bits first and 64bits shortly thereafter.

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!

This is not recommended and it's not supported. Only eth0 is supported at the moment. Howere, we're starting to capture what it takes to run on a secondary controller such as eth1.

During the installation of Fedora in Amahi 5, 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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Note that a few of the benefits of your HDA will not work if you disable DHCP on your server.

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

• First turn on Advanced Settings, under Setup --> Settings
• Then go to the Setup --> Applications --> Server
• Once there, find the DHCP and unselect both "Watchdog. DHCP Server is being monitored 24x7" and "Start at Boot time"

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

The Linux users are being used for VPN access. If you need to allow user to VPN user, create a Linux user. Samba users are managed separately with the Samba configuration tool, and it can use the Linux users, however, one has to actually create them specifically for Samba.

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

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

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, however, you should always apply security updates if the system prompts you for them
• Fedora updates are not enabled automatically. This is for stability reasons. We don't discourage users from updating. You can do Fedora updates by using the tools that come up on the screen, or you can update by hand via the command line, with yum update.

This seems to work well and we got good feedback on it, users like it. However, we may change this in the future based on feedback.

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 (email to support, or in the forums), indicating that you updated.