Hi, I did not do that; I switched off the dhcp server on the amahi box. Even on home server it relies on the robust server in my router. Cannot see why that should be different for amahi ;-) For Amahi networking to work reliably (and for the VPN to give you access to the entire home network) Amahi ...

I tried that, but by using the vpn connection i lost my ability to connect to my homeserver completely Does your Amahi home server provide DNS to all the machines on your home network (including the WHS?) In order to reach it correctly it must get it's DNS and DHCP lease from the Amahi home server ...

If you use the VPN that comes as standard with Amahi then you will be able to get to both (since it will look like you are on your home network!)

Note: if you just want to share some folders another solution would be to use DropBox.com
This is independent of Amahi and will likely be cheaper (you get a few gigabytes of storage replication free.)

Congrats on going where my kids grandparents (my parents) fear to tread! If you can install the Fedora operating system then Amahi will do it for you. So, you will need 1. a machine to install Amahi on, 2. a Fedora installation disk (download and burn a DVD). 3. some time to install Then so the kids...

Another option is to change the configuration on your home router to use subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and then take it freom there.

Depending on what you want to do, you can use OpenVPN ALS (in testing by the community).
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvpn-als/

OK -- here's all I know. OpenVPN uses a different protocol (not IPsec, not PPTP, etc.)

You need to get your HDA to get it's IP lease from your router.
I am not exactly sure ow to do this - if you follow http://forums.amahi.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=280 that may give you some hints.

The "out of the box" VPN with Amahi is OpenVPN -- so you will need an OpenVPN client.
There is an open source VPN option that you could use (OpenSwan) - but you'd likely have to be a networking guru to configure it on Amahi.