just some feedback and cudos

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sgtfoo
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Joined: Sun Jul 18, 2010 8:27 pm

just some feedback and cudos

Postby sgtfoo » Sat Apr 23, 2011 9:50 pm

A quick hello to current and future users and developers of Amahi and its community.

I've been an amahi user for about 1 year+ now. Beforehand I was flipping between FreeNAS and CentOS and Ubuntu to provide a home network share / media server solution for my apartment.

Amahi5 on F12 was great for what I got out of it.
- DLNA was my media server and worked well to stream from it to my PS3 to my TV
- Greyhole, while confusing at first, becomes simpler when you accept the work it does in stride, and let ALL your drives be pooled (I learned this very recently. after looking at (ALL+hidden) folder on the drives it used and didn't use before my upgrade to Amahi6.
- File sharing was great
- headless management via ssh & vnc took some reading and learning on my part and I enjoy learning this stuff, so that was all fine.

By no means though would I have considered it to be a complete product. It always felt beta in some sense. Adding drives (yes I know we all know it's a rough process) was tough at first, but once you get the hang of it, the process becomes easy. I imagine the solution will become a script that can be run from the dashboard upon connecting a fresh new drive.
It never felt complete, even though it seems like the team aims to make it seem as such.

This brings me to the upgrade I recently did from F12 to F14 and thus to Amahi6.
First off, I commend the team that for the efforts towards the new OS and Amahi version. My new Amahi6 server is working great.
I will divulge a bunch of feedback to hopefully be taken constructively though.....

- I'm not so sure having people pay for open-source origin apps is the best idea when the project still feels in its infancy. Upon breaking into mainstream, the everyday user would only pickup this solution if they nearly never need to see a terminal command line. I have no problem with command line at my stage in the game, but if you seek a mass market of people as users.. clicks and fill-in fields is the way to go. Ease of use and use-case scenarios was a topic of discussion before Amahi6 (while it was in alpha/beta) and I think both topics deserve more consideration.
The pay-for-apps part mostly hits me with the cost of something like DLNA, which as it seems is the most basic and ideal solution for Amahi to be a media server, which as the team describes Amahi, includes to be at minimum a media server along with file server. I would rather donate to the project altogether to get MUCH added functionality than pay cash for a single more necessary piece.

- My box hasn't needed "service" (so-to-speak) since I setup all my custom settings and headless access. It hasn't needed a reboot nor had any kernel crashes as I had before. This may be due to using F14, and/or the fresh Amahi version... either way... awesome to not have to dig in a fix stuff at random.

Regarding my upgrade path... I attempted the upgrade path in a sandbox virtualbox install of F12 to F14. It seemed fine, and so I tried it on the real box and it wouldn't go right. No documentation/wiki/forum help would suffice. I guess this is due to the size of the testing field.

In the end I did a format and fresh install. I took that opportunity to swap in a WD Raptor (10000RPM) drive, which has made bootups quite fast! delightful!

Sadly though, the fresh install wasn't entirely smooth. It turns out that various things (such as rubyrails, sinatra, mysql) had to be pre-fixed/installed/setup in order to get things to jive. This rings back to user experience where the majority of the masses won't even touch the terminal to deal with these specifics. It's these little workarounds that make Amahi still seem like a beta project in a complete project's shoes.

This was just some feedback. I wanted to post it and anyone with similar experience could attest to this perhaps. The dev team should know they did an awesome job. I wish I could help out more with the project, aside from donations, but I wanted to voice opinion. The users will decide the success of the project more than anyone else. Also please don't grow too far out of the open-source free-to-use software realm, as I feel that would taint this great project.
SgtFoo
HDA: VM inside oVirt FX-8300 95w (2 cores for HDA), 32GB RAM (2GB for HDA)
My PC: FX-8300, 16GB RAM, 3x 1TB HDDs, Radeon HD6970 2GB video; Win10 Pro x64
Other: PC, Asus 1215n (LXLE), Debian openZFS server (3x(2x2tb) mirrors)
Modem&Network: Thomson DCM475; Asus RT-AC66U; HP 1800-24G switch

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