FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

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

Yes! That's what's recommended!

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!

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.

Not yet, but soon. We usually wait until the dust settles for new distribution releases before jumping on to it. The reason is to provide more stability!

Yes. A lot of the benefits of having an Amahi HDA is derived from the fact that it makes networking simpler through being the DHCP and DNS server in the network.

This makes the network a first-class network, with DHCP-requested names automatically becoming DNS names within your chosen home domain.

You will hardly ever have to type IP addresses again :-)

We do not currently support CentOS, however, there are several 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 (related to Ruby on Rails) to make it work. However, we do hope that one day soon it can be supported.

At the moment, we have alpha 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.

Not yet. We would like to support the Xbox (maybe through XBMC), the Xbox360 and the Playstation 3. This is in the works at the moment. Interested in suggesting what to pick?

Amahi is a new kind of open source distro. There is no single manual download that takes place. 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 (SourceForge) and the repos in our Technology Section.

Not yet! We're planning on it. The best of to use the users mailing list for now.

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.

Your router still has to connect to the ISP (through the WAN interface, maybe via a DHCP client on that side - which you should not disable). You probably also have a firewall there (which you should not touch either).

That is the WAN side, then there is the LAN side, which is what's important here.

The clients will broadcast a request for a dhcp lease once they connect to the wifi network (after encryption has been established, if any), and the request will travel through the router, which will be re-broacast in your internal network (because your router'd DHCP server is turned off), until it reaches the Amahi HDA.

The Amahi HDA which will then reply with a lease and will make it to the client and the client will start working.

It will still use your router as the gateway to the Internet. the Amahi HDA is used as DHCP and caching DNS server (and file server, calendar server, wiki server, ...).

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

then configure the interface with your static settings.

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! :-)

We recommend a short domain. Not only it's cute, it saves typing.

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, however, this is not very sophisticated.

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.

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.

Grey question. We recommend you do apply all updates before the Amahi install. The reason is to have the latest software patches to begin with.

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.

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

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

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. We rely on the features in the base Linux distro for that. 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.

The DHCP server in the HDA can be stopped by doing this (as root):

        service monit stop
        service dhcpd stop

Note that many of the benefits of the HDA will be stopped. 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, since we don't know what behavior other DHCP servers will provide.

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.

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]]

or like this

          ThisIsANewLink

then click on it to create a new page. ThisIsKnownAsCamelCase.

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