Everything is on Fire and it isn't ok (Setup help please)

hydranmenace
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jan 05, 2021 4:45 pm

Everything is on Fire and it isn't ok (Setup help please)

Postby hydranmenace » Tue Jan 05, 2021 8:39 pm

Hardware:
m2n61-ax motherboard from a Dell Inspiron 531
AMD Athalon 64
4 Gb ram

Asus RT-AC88U router, with working DDNS with asuscomm.com. Unsure that will matter but I don't know anything so not sure what might conflict with what.

I'm not even sure where to begin here. This will the third time trying to post this because every time I click submit it asks me to log in again and when I do the page loses everything I wrote so I have to start over. Which is... roughly on par with my experience of trying to get Amahi working.

I know nothing about Amahi. I just want a shared NAS for backups, plex, and Emby, and want to be able to use those things from anywhere.

I found the amahi main page and entered the information it asked for. I set an IP of 192.168.1.10 for what will be the HDA in the router. That is the correct thing to do isn't it? That is the IP I used when I set up my account here.

I then installed following the guides I could find for Amahi 11 on Fedora Server 27. It took ages. Literal days. I went to work, came home, slept, woke up, and it was still installing things. Prob my fault as I installed to a 16Gb USB key and maybe that's why it took so long.
That seemed to progress fine, if taking a lot of time, I eventually got to a log in terminal and used the credentials I used here and during installation. No root password set, used same credentials for username and password on the HDA as I did account creation on this site, set that user as admin. Logged in. Then followed command line guide to install the HDA which also took another full day.

During install it said it couldn't start a database. I ran the last command a second time and that seemed to fix it. It redownloaded one package, installed it, and no more errors.
I rebooted the machine and logged in a second time.
I did ping www.google.com and was successful.
I went to my desktop and went to 192.168.1.10:9090 and was presented with a page where I could set up hard drives, format them, create a RAID array, look at logs and check errors. There was an update tab but it said a package was missing so I didn't bother with it.
From this page, which I assumed was the "Dashboard" the guide talked about, I could see CPU usage, network traffic, etc. I could not find any place to install apps.
If I tried http://hda/ the page would time out. If I tried 192.168.1.10 without the :9090 the page would time out. If I tried to scan for shares with the Amahi app, it would say unable to connect, tap to retry.

Based on the fact that I could ping things from the HDA and had a dashboard, I assumed the issue with not seeing shares was because I had to transition my network. So I followed that guide. The transitioning guide said http://hda/ and mobile apps likely wouldn't work until this transition happened so I thought that was my issue. The guide said not to disable DHCP in my router unless I had a dashboard and was fully working. How do you determine it is fully working? It seemed to be to me? How would a new user know? Ping worked. Dashboard worked.

Disabled DHCP and everything connected to the net in my house went dark. Had to reset my router to factory and restore settings that I thankfully had backed up beforehand.

The amahi.org/users control panel here says that my HDA is still "Awaiting install", even though it is installed and I have logged in to it and formatted drives and created new partitions with it.

I am very frustrated with this experience. I am finding information on the Wiki in one location that I would think would be in another. There are troubleshooting steps I found to determine the HDA is fully connected that are in a troubleshooting page that a new user would find AFTER something goes wrong. Like turning off router DHCP before they should, rather than in the actual "Before you transition" section where they should be, so a new user knows what commands to run and things to check fully first. Not after everything is on fire.

None of this makes any sense to me, as I have this dashboard, though features seem to be missing, and I can't turn DHCP off on my router without killing everything and I don't know why, while the control panel here doesn't even know my machine is on. I see posts on reddit about how easy Amahi is and all I can think is I must be missing something pretty big, because so far I hate it.
Can anyone please help?

User avatar
bigfoot65
Project Manager
Posts: 11924
Joined: Mon May 25, 2009 4:31 pm

Re: Everything is on Fire and it isn't ok (Setup help please)

Postby bigfoot65 » Wed Jan 06, 2021 8:15 pm

I set an IP of 192.168.1.10 for what will be the HDA in the router.
It's important to follow the instructions. You don't set the IP address for the HDA on the router. No need as Amahi will assign a static IP address based on your choice.
I then installed following the guides I could find for Amahi 11 on Fedora Server 27. It took ages. Literal days. I went to work, came home, slept, woke up, and it was still installing things. Prob my fault as I installed to a 16Gb USB key and maybe that's why it took so long.
Amahi does not support installation on a USB flash drive. It's important that you verify your system meets the system requirements. It's likely rhe USB drive is the root of your issues. Also the Amahi Docs site provide the install guidance to be followed.
I went to my desktop and went to 192.168.1.10:9090 and was presented with a page where I could set up hard drives, format them, create a RAID array, look at logs and check errors. There was an update tab but it said a package was missing so I didn't bother with it. From this page, which I assumed was the "Dashboard" the guide talked about, I could see CPU usage, network traffic, etc. I could not find any place to install apps.
No where in the instructions did it state to go to that address. That is a Fedora Dashboard that is not fully installed as it's for advanced users. We don't recommend using it as it will conflict with Amahi.
From this page, which I assumed was the "Dashboard" the guide talked about, I could see CPU usage, network traffic, etc. I could not find any place to install apps.
If I tried http://hda/ the page would time out. If I tried 192.168.1.10 without the :9090 the page would time out. If I tried to scan for shares with the Amahi app, it would say unable to connect, tap to retry.
This is likely a result of using the USB flash drive. ThHe Amahi dashboard is the main control hub for the HDA to include installing applications.
The transitioning guide said http://hda/ and mobile apps likely wouldn't work until this transition happened so I thought that was my issue. The guide said not to disable DHCP in my router unless I had a dashboard and was fully working. How do you determine it is fully working?
You can also access the HDA by IP Address. That would be the best way to ensure it's working before turning off your DHCP server on the router. All these items are documented in the instructions, so maybe you overlooked them.
Disabled DHCP and everything connected to the net in my house went dark. Had to reset my router to factory and restore settings that I thankfully had backed up beforehand.
Shame on you for doing this as you clearly did not have a working HDA. All the warning signs were there that something was amiss. You should have sought assistance at that time before proceeding.
I am very frustrated with this experience. I am finding information on the Wiki in one location that I would think would be in another. There are troubleshooting steps I found to determine the HDA is fully connected that are in a troubleshooting page that a new user would find AFTER something goes wrong. Like turning off router DHCP before they should, rather than in the actual "Before you transition" section where they should be, so a new user knows what commands to run and things to check fully first. Not after everything is on fire.
We have tried to document the steps as best as we can. If you have specific suggestions, we can consider them. We are always trying to improve our documentation. I am not blaming you, but very few users have issues, especially as many as you had.

I am sorry to hear you have had such a bad experience, but I feel things would go better if you ask questions when you are unsure. Don't guess and make things worse.

My recommendation would be to start over. First, use a hard disk drive and not a USB flash drive. Next don't reserve an IP address for your HDA with your router. Then carefully follow the Minimal CD Install method. Finally, ensure your HDA is working before turning off the router DHCP server.

I think if you take your time and carefully follow the steps outlined in the install instructions along with my guidance above things will work as expected. I am happy to assist as needed, so feel free to ask.
ßîgƒσστ65
Applications Manager

My HDA: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz on MSI board, 16GB RAM, 1TBx1+2TBx2+4TBx2

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 11 guests