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 HDA.

Yes!

To be more precise, Amahi relies on Linux, your hardware and the BIOS for that. In other words, it's really not up to Amahi to suppor RAID, as that is a core OS, motherboard and BIOS feature.

So, if you know how to configure and manage RAID in one of the many ways possible, you're golden!

Now, this is an FAQ if there is one!

We're really interested in supporting Ubuntu. However, we need help in doing so, since we're longtime Redhat addicts. :-) If you are interested in helping, please contact us!

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.

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

Note that this choice has no bearing with things as seen from the outside of your home network. However, you will not be able to see anything from that external domain while accessing the internet from your home network, so choose a domain that you

• don't care about
• that 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, however, this is not very sophisticated.

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

We do not recommend using IPs above .100 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 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! That's what's recommended!

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.

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.

Yes, that is not exposed yet, because the user interface is rough. Basically, add them in hda://hda/hosts.

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! :-)

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! :-)

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.

This is not as easy at the moment as it should be. See some help here.

The 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. 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.

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).

The question continues: I can edit existing pages but have yet to figure out how to create a new one (there no button or link like the one on yourhda page for creating a new page that I can see).

The way to do this is to create a new link and then populate it. To create a new link, you can do it in the the text interface like this:

          [[This is a new link]]

          ThisIsANewLink

Another way is to type a URL link, like: http://wiki/ThisIsANewLink and if the page does not exist, the wiki will note it and attempt to create it.

See more on how to create both internal (wiki only) and external (global web) links in the Help:Contents page in your wiki.

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