As you might recall in my previous post I talked about the Amahi home server. I feel obligated to explain a little bit more about this amazing piece of software and how easy it is to set it up.
The first thing you need to do is register on their website. You will need to provide some information about your server installation. Like which ip you are going to give this machine, it is very important that you stick with this configuration or it will break the installation. After you’ve provided the necessary information you will receive an installation ID which will set up and configure the amahi system on your machine.
After you’ve received the id you can start setting up the fedora 12 OS on your server, during the install you will get the option to add a repository. In this stage you have to add the amahi repository. It will add an install Amahi link to the desktop of your new fedora install. Upon clicking on the install icon you will need to enter the id you have received. Once the install has completed your Amahi server is up and running.
The people at Amahi recommend to use this new server as your dhcp and dns server (it uses opendns).
I however like to turn of my machines when I don’t use them. So I decided to leave the dhcp task to my router and disabled it on the Amahi server.
In order to fully utilize and make sure that you can do everything the amahi server has to offer you need to change your dns server (in your router, or network setting) to the ip of your amahi server.
Once that is done you can simply surf to http://hda and start configuring your shares, add users and install applications. I use the server mostly for file sharing and as a bit torrent client.
The applications that I have installed on the server are:
You can use this server headless, to shutdown you can easily navigate to the settings page and click the shutdown button.
The only thing that seems to be missing is a backup option for your server. After al if you are going to put all of your data on this system you want to be sure that it is secure. Hopefully this feature will be added afterwards. But for now I’ll just connect a usb drive the the machine and backup myself on a frequent basis. Though I fully believe to perfect Amahi this option should be added it in the future. However for clients there is software available to backup to the Amahi server, still it remains strange that they did not provide a backup solution for the Amahi server itself. A nicer design of the web management page is also welcome.
Overall I am quite content of this opensource product. I honestly believe that it thoroughly kicks the ass of the Windows Home Server. It is also a plus that virtually every common Operating System is supported.
To build the server itself I used the Intel D510MO mainboard, a stick of 2GB memory and a 640GB Harddrive. As a case I used an old unused one which still had its power supply. I considered adding a second stick of 2GB memory, but seeing the load in phpsysinfo I can tell that it isn’t needed.
I’ve added some screenshots of Amahi to the gallery:
Well all Microsoft Products have reached the 2010 lineup.
