General Experience / Issues After Install

[autumnwalker]

Hi Folks,

I spent the evening installing / configuring my Amahi box following the instructions exactly as written. All services enabled and generally working well. What I'm calling Zeroconf VPN is amazing. I labored for days trying to get OpenVPN setup on my DD-WRT box only to have it fail two weeks later. Plug in Amahi and BAM, it works. However, some things are not so pleasant...

Amahi guided me to download and install Fedora 14 - which I now understand is still beta / under development (for use with Amahi) and should not be used other than testing; not a huge deal since I'm not using this to store production data, but it's something that should be considered revising in the new install guide - it was not clear that it's beta. It was printed out in large, bold, green letters to download Fedora 14.

I had been using my Mac all day (since I borrowed the KVM from my Windows 7 box for my Amahi setup) to test and use http://hda. No issues. I moved my Amahi box to its proper, headless location and fired up my W7 box. I can access http://hda no problem and I can see \\HDA in the Network window, but I cannot access it. Fiddling around in the forums I understand this is an issue with Fedora 14 (again, should be more clear about the status of using that version) and that I need to putter around in my credential manager to use lowercase characters (\\hda).

After going through that I can access \\hda. I decide to create a new share in Amahi called "Backup" since the whole purpose of this is to create a backup server for my Mac and my W7 PC. I refresh the network window on my W7 box and "backup" doesn't show up. I refresh the network window on my Mac and it's there right away. About 2 minutes later it shows up in Windows.

After showing up in Windows, I mapped the network drive since I want to point the W7 backup tool at it. When I go to "my computer" to make sure everything worked ok I notice that the "backup" share is only 50 GB; which I thought was very strange since I just added a 2 TB drive to the machine. I looked around in Amahi trying to figure out where 50 GB came from and realized that it is the size of my root drive. That Fedora 14 (when using all the default settings) decided to partition my original 300 GB drive into a 50 GB partition for root, another large partition for /home, and a swap area. I did a quick Google on that and found buried in the Amahi wiki that splitting up the drives (LVM) is a bad idea... but that's what Fedora 14 does when you follow the defaults!

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Is my experience typical? I knew this wouldn't be along the lines of WHS and on a scale of 1 - 10 (one being total noob and 10 being Linus Torvalds) I'm probably about a four. I'm not afraid of Linux / Amachi and getting my hands dirty with terminal / bash, but I thought that Amahi was supposed to be a little bit more point and shoot than what I have experienced.

Also, if anyone has ideas / fixes for my 50 GB issue it would be greatly appreciated. I assume that Amahi uses the root drive as a "landing area" for files transferred to the shares and then moves them accordingly (required for Grayhole?). How can I rebuild that drive without nuking the whole setup?

If Amahi is going to be a "Home Digital Assistant" it needs to just work. People can't be fiddling around in terminal and trolling on Google trying to figure out why they can see \\HDA but can only access it via \\hda. My confidence in the solution is shaken... I want it to work really bad and I love where it's going, but I'm afraid I'll be burned by it being so fragile and losing my files / network (DNS, DHCP, VPN).

[cpg]

i would not say typical. we are aware of the situation with adding drives. it's in line for development when we have time.

to fix your share issue, find out where you mounted your drive (say, e.g. /some/path) and then change the share path to some folder inside /some/path. then that share will be allocated from that drive! /var/hda/files (the default area for new shares) is probably in your root drive (hence the 50gb).

we will remove the "beta" label at some point. we're working on some way to collect anonymous usage statistics so that when someone new asks "how reliable is Amahi" we can answer with facts. we do know Amahi has been serving thousands of people 24x7 across the world for years now, which makes it billions of machine hours. About storage, we know Amahi is managing Petabytes, but not sure how many. We have not seen any bugs causing user data loss, though we have had some corner cases (most of them gone) with drive pooling (Greyhole).

hth!

[autumnwalker]

to fix your share issue, find out where you mounted your drive (say, e.g. /some/path) and then change the share path to some folder inside /some/path. then that share will be allocated from that drive! /var/hda/files (the default area for new shares) is probably in your root drive (hence the 50gb).

so my new drive is mounted at /var/hda/files/drives/drive1

my share is /var/hda/files/Backup

I need to make the share /var/hda/files/drives/drive1/Backup, just by changing the path in the shares tab?

How will this affect Grayhole when I add another drive and turn it on? Will my backup share grow with Grayhole?

I'm rather pleased overall with the solution I think the team is doing great work! I'm currently sitting at the airport, VPN'd into my Amahi box / network and able to use my own network connection to avoid the firesheep

[autumnwalker]

I updated as you suggested and my share now shows the 2 TB drive. Thanks!

Since the install of Fedora partitioned my system drive into root and /home, is it safe to add /home to my Grayhole pool or should I expand the root partition to be the only partition on that drive? I recall reading somewhere on the wiki that the system drive should be 100% root, don't partition for /home and don't use swap - is this best practice for Amahi?