Amahi Forums

I would like to start with a big applause for developers of Amahi. Great job! You turned my old and idle PC laptop (which, BTW, I almost recycled...) into a monster. All of a sudden it became the most useful device in my home, because it manages my entire network thanks to Amahi, and it does so surprisingly fast. It has been 2 weeks without a glitch! I even get wireless TimeMachine backups without a time capsule (although it was a little tricky)...

I hope you don't mind my unorganized and long questions/comments:

* Is there a way to select a protocol other than samba? Samba cannot handle symbolic links unless they are explicitly shown as a "share point". Also each share point appears as mounted volumes on MacOS desktop, which I don't really like.

* Does Amahi come with a script that updates the IP to openDNS? Because openDNS website recommends downloading uploaders for that, but I guess its not needed with Amahi, am I right? My pre-Amahi solution was a cronjob that writes the external IP to a file in Dropbox, I hope I can finally get rid of that.

* Is there a way to limit network bandwidth of computers (with or without static IP addresses)? Max 20KB/s, for example?

* I saw that this question had already been discussed, but I would like to ask again... I happened to install fedora with disk encryption, mostly out of curiosity, because I wanted to see if it incurs any latency. But sadly I found out that it asks for a password at every boot. This is really bad, especially when I am traveling... Is there a way around that, except for a robot which can type

* Is there any instructions to migrate Amahi to a new machine, keeping all the settings? I mean, what happens I buy one of those cool green nettops in the future, do I have to set everything from scratch? (which won't be that much of a issue tough, thanks to Amahi's easy setup)

* I have an iPhone, but I could not figure out a way to stream videos/music to it... Have anybody tried that? Also, are there any instructions to setup the VPN on the iPhone to connect to the home network?

* My external HD is formatted with Journaled HFS, but Fedora cannot write to it. Does it mean I have to format the disk with ext3? I have already done it for the time machine partition, but I would like to keep the rest of the disk as it is. Is there Linux support for writing to HFS?

* And pleeeease support Ubuntu soon! Fedora does not recognize my video card, it does not blank the screen when I close the lid (instead, it *always* suspends and never wakes up). My settings in the power management panel are somehow completely ignored. I have been using this machine with Ubuntu for a long time without these problems.

* There is probably another thread for app requests, I will also put this there, but it would be great to have a web version of the JbidWatcher. It would be so cool to manage ebay auctions and automatically snipe right off the web!

Thanks so much in advance

thanks for your kind words towards amahi. the community is what makes it all possible!

* Is there a way to select a protocol other than samba? Samba cannot handle symbolic links unless they are explicitly shown as a "share point". Also each share point appears as mounted volumes on MacOS desktop, which I don't really like.

you can, it's your box!
you can add NFS, or AFP.
the amahi interface covers samba only, through there are bug requests to make other type of shares easily accessible. i truly wish we had some extra manpower or funds to get this done, as it's interesting.

Does Amahi come with a script that updates the IP to openDNS? Because openDNS website recommends downloading uploaders for that, but I guess its not needed with Amahi, am I right? My pre-Amahi solution was a cronjob that writes the external IP to a file in Dropbox, I hope I can finally get rid of that.

no, but the dyndns updates automatically. maybe we can also do that for opendns. do you have a script or some idea how to do it? that would help.

Is there a way to limit network bandwidth of computers (with or without static IP addresses)? Max 20KB/s, for example?

the traffic in your network does not go through amahi, so it cannot be done as is.

no idea about the boot password for encryption. check the fedora forums?

Is there any instructions to migrate Amahi to a new machine, keeping all the settings? I mean, what happens I buy one of those cool green nettops in the future, do I have to set everything from scratch? (which won't be that much of a issue tough, thanks to Amahi's easy setup)

we have discussed providing this as a service to the community. however, we need to get other services up and running first.yes, it would be very useful. support in the form of hardware, bandwidth or donations will help

about the iphone, please thank apple and their business practices for that. it's a closed platform and the only media they let you stream is what they can charge you for.

for the vpn, same thing, it "duplicates" the function they already provide (in a closed way), so you cannot do openvpn in the iphone. amahi does not currently

My external HD is formatted with Journaled HFS, but Fedora cannot write to it. Does it mean I have to format the disk with ext3? I have already done it for the time machine partition, but I would like to keep the rest of the disk as it is. Is there Linux support for writing to HFS?

i am pretty sure f12 can write to hfs+.
i had a mac partition on my laptop.
though it may be just read only by default and write may have to be turned on?

more later ..

no, but the dyndns updates automatically. maybe we can also do that for opendns. do you have a script or some idea how to do it? that would help.

Himm.. Does it mean that I will not be able to connect home if I reboot the DSL modem and get a different IP from the pool? In fact, I had a domain name from dyndns before installing Amahi. But in my understanding, Ahami installation is hardwired to opendns... If there is a way around this, periodic IP updates would be possible with dyndns's uploader for linux. I noticed (on mac) that this uploader did not update the IP frequent enough, so I wrote a small script to periodically restart the server, which forced an update:
I stole the "curl" line from internet, probably from a forum. The Dropbox log is just for my convenience.

I placed a crontab entry, which was firing up this script every hour. I assume same approach would work for Linux too. Regardless of Amahi-assigned opendns, users can also get a hostname from dyndns and run this updater. I can ping to both hostnames and get the correct IP. Let me try to get this working, then you guys could place it in a wiki as an option.

about the iphone, please thank apple and their business practices for that. it's a closed platform and the only media they let you stream is what they can charge you for. for the vpn, same thing, it "duplicates" the function they already provide (in a closed way), so you cannot do openvpn in the iphone. amahi does not currently

Well, that's a bummer... If you ask them, they will claim they have VPN support on iPhone. They seem to support L2TP, PPTP and IPSec, but not in a "open" way I guess It would be awesome to be able to connect to home server through 3G.

f12 can write to hfs+.
i had a mac partition on my laptop.
though it may be just read only by default and write may have to be turned on?
more later ..

Wow, I was so sure this was not possible that I already formatted my drive with ext3. When Time machine creates a sparsebundle on a HFS+, I figured you can move it to a ext3 partition. Although Time machine cannot directly initiate a sparse bundle on an ext3, it can use an existing one and expands its size when necessary. It's almost like 'seeding' ext3 with a small sparse bundle for the Time machine to use.

I still cannot write to HFS+ from fedora, tough... I can mount to it and read its contents, but that's it. Maybe there is an 'experimental' support? Just like the first days for NTFS Linux support...

Anyway, thanks a lot for your answers! I have more questions but this time I will try to place them into more proper threads