Moving from Windows Home Server

[smeep]

Hi everyone, I'm currently on WHS v1 but would like to modernize and so I'm evaluating various replacement OS's. Amahi and Greyhole look terrific, and I was wondering if any current users would be willing to take a few moments to share their experiences and comment on any strengths and weaknesses they've encountered.

WHS has been pretty good for me. Easy to install and configure, and it just ran without issues. I have a little experience with Linux, but nothing too low-level. Does Amahi take much fiddling to keep things running? Has Greyhole been stable and fast for you? Any gotchas you can think of? Any issues with stepping outside of the Amahi apps and installing 3rd party software yourself?

My current setup is a Core i3 server with four 2 TB drives, used for Windows and Mac backups, file storage, and media serving (via Universal Media Server). It also runs PlayOn for serving some web TV content to my television, but as this is a Windows-only app I'll either have to ditch it or run it inside of a Windows VM, should I end up moving to Linux. I love the concept of drive extender for redundancy, which is why Greyhole sounds so exciting (but the thought of mounting and removing drives with terminal commands isn't thrilling).

Thanks! I'll be very eager to read any feedback you all might have.

[bsk]

Welcome to the Amahi forums! Now my opinion is a bit biased because I am not a windows fan, but like yourself, I did come from Windows (only difference I use it on my desktops as well, not just my Amahi server).

I have not used Greyhole personally but I have only heard good things about it, I know there are many active users in the forums that do use it, so their responses should come shortly.

Installing and setting up Amahi (again, dont know if greyhole takes much fiddling) is pretty straight forward, and just about everything can be done from the web interface. Serving content to those media devices are easy to setup with the surplus of apps that help with it. One of them being DLNA (http://www.amahi.org/apps/dlna).

I noticed you also backup OS X machines, Amahi supports Time Machine (http://www.amahi.org/apps/amahi-time-machine) backups as well as others (how tos posted in the wiki http://wiki.amahi.org/)

Running commands in the CLI is not as scary as it sounds, as long as you follow directions. We have put those in place in the Amahi Wiki on how to do things. CLI is not as pretty as point and click, but it gets the job done. And of course, you can get help by posting here in the forums or heading over to the IRC channel on Freenode (http://talk.amahi.org/).

I hope this helps a bit, and dont hesitate to ask any questions.

Again, welcome to Amahi

[bigfoot65]

This might help as well.

https://github.com/gboudreau/Greyhole/w ... ateFromWHS

[smeep]

Hi, thanks for the warm welcome!

bsk: Yep, my current Time Machine configuration also uses netatalk (running in a small VM on WHS), so that should be a smooth transition from WHS to Amahi.

And thanks for the reassurance about running CLI commands. For me it's not that it's scary, it's that if a command changes slightly from the instructions or if something doesn't quite look the same as the example then you have to dig around, post questions, etc. This used to be fine but now there's a baby in the house and I don't have the time to do fun stuff like this anymore.

bigfoot65: I did see that migration document, thanks! Both Amahi and Greyhole seem to be very well documented, which is fantastic and refreshing.

If any other users would like to share their experiences and insights, I would love to read about them.

Thank you!