What a piece of crap.

[poon]

Hi,
This must be the most unfriendly Home-server software ever.
I have just decided to get rid of mu old Microsoft WHS v.1 installation, so I have started to try out
some other software.
After some reading I thought that Amahi seemed to be a software to be similar to WHS.
So after downloading Fedora 14 and installing it, The Amahi part of the installation came.
Well, the first part of the installation was OK, but, now comes the big issue.
I wanted to have my 4 pcs. 2 TB disks for the storage, but since I didn't have them installed from the start
of the installation of Fedora they weren't in the storage pool.
But I could see the disks undet the storage, disks tab in the HDA setup, but I can't do anything from there.
The only thing I can do are to see that I have some disks, but I can't do anything from there.

So I go to the shares tab to see if I can do anything from there, but I can only see the drive that I had during tha installation.
Well, I can see something about greyhole, (I have read that the WHS demigrator and greyhole has a similat function) so I click that link
and a website opens with some fancy pictures telling you to just add some bunch disks to the server and the storage pool.
But nothing there tells you how to add the disks to the storage pool.
Finally I find a webpage with the instruction how to add disks to the storage pool, wtf, do you really think that ordinary people used to
Microsoft WHS or even Apples OSX gonna read all this piece of c**p with all those terminal commands, don't get me wrong now, I'm an advanced user
that has 30 years of experience from mostly all of the operating system.
But this was a real disappointment, from the information that I have been reading before I tried it iut it all looked very easy to set up, so I was really
looking forward to tell all my friends that has been asking me for a replacement of the Microsoft WHS that this one was the one they should use instead.
But no, I can't recommend anyone that are looking for an easy to set up and get going home-server software, to use this one instead of WHS.

If you want Amahi to be a replacement for WHS you really have to get rid of all the terminal steps during any of the steps at the installation.
I have about 20 friends that have been using WHS v.1 since the start, and there haven't been any big problems at all, but if I tell them to use
Amahi instead, wow, I can just imagine all the work trying to explain for them how to type commands in the terminal, and so on........

Everything really MUST be done in a graphical user interface with just point and click.

Good luck with the next version, hope that one will be better than this one.

[ghstryder]

It is a bit odd. I just did a full reinstall and it took me all of about 3 minutes to add the second drive and use it with Greyhole. Pretty complicated, I know.

[mandros]

WHS discs are in a propretary format. They can be read as external devices but can't be part of a Linux setup without a little more than average knowledge.
You could have been aware of the fact Linux and Microsoft are not the same thing.

Depending on the amount of your data you could either try backing it up and add your 4x2tb to Amahi, using webmin might help, or try a conversion of the filesystem.
The latter being very risky on dataloss.

[poon]

WHS discs are in a propretary format. They can be read as external devices but can't be part of a Linux setup without a little more than average knowledge.
You could have been aware of the fact Linux and Microsoft are not the same thing.

Depending on the amount of your data you could either try backing it up and add your 4x2tb to Amahi, using webmin might help, or try a conversion of the filesystem.
The latter being very risky on dataloss.

I didn't use the old WHS disks, I'm using 4 all new 2 TB disks in a completely different server, having the old WHS running until my Amahi setup is done.
The thing that I'm complaining about are the documentation I get when trying to find how to add new harddisks to the greyhole pool, everything has do be done in the terminal.
If this ever gonna be a replacement for all the WHS out there, then it must be easier to set it up.
I don't have any problems to use the terminal, but I'm thinking about all others that wants to replace the WHS with Amahi.
If the setup ain't done in a graphical user interface, then there will be a lot of problem, that's why I can't recommend Amahi to my friends as a replacement for WHS.

[robi]

Hi Poon,

Asking for help instead of bashing projects in what "experienced" people do. I had a problem with my Uverse router and asked for help and got nice helpful replys.

Robi

[ciscoh]

everyone has a different perspective.


i will never recommend that piece of crap WHS to anyone. It was always eating my time troubleshooting and fixing....


Amahi has been running without issues since i installed it. If Amahi was a woman, i would ..........


Anyways, Amahi is not for everyone but i have no problem recommending it.

[IceFragmatic]

Firstly, how much did you pay M$ for WHS? (or is it pirated?) Secondly, how much did you pay for Amahi? Ok, now stop your whinging. If you want to see it improved then learn to program and help them out. Until then, stop your whining.

Yes, you do need to roll up your sleeves. The programmers are looking at that, but they want to get the basics right first before making it look pretty. Remeber, WHS came out with a major bug which caused file corruption. Which would you rather have? If you like your sugar coating, then go back to WHS.

Until then, be thankful there are some good programmers who are putting in a lot of time - for no reward - to give us a great system.

I am so thankful those programmer have thick hides, 'cos comments like yours could very easily discourage them and then we would have to accept M$ offerings as there would be nothing else.

If you want to make a suggestion then go lodge a feature request (I have), but dont make negative whinges here. If you dont like it, then dont use it....If you had paid for it and been misled, then I may be a bit more sympathic toward you. But right now I just think you are pathetic....

This must be the most unfriendly Home-server software ever.
I have just decided to get rid of mu old Microsoft WHS v.1 installation, so I have started to try out
some other software.

Finally I find a webpage with the instruction how to add disks to the storage pool, wtf, do you really think that ordinary people used to
Microsoft WHS or even Apples OSX gonna read all this piece of c**p with all those terminal commands, don't get me wrong now, I'm an advanced user
that has 30 years of experience from mostly all of the operating system.
If you want Amahi to be a replacement for WHS you really have to get rid of all the terminal steps during any of the steps at the installation.
I have about 20 friends that have been using WHS v.1 since the start, and there haven't been any big problems at all, but if I tell them to use
Amahi instead, wow, I can just imagine all the work trying to explain for them how to type commands in the terminal, and so on........

Everything really MUST be done in a graphical user interface with just point and click.

Good luck with the next version, hope that one will be better than this one.

If this ever gonna be a replacement for all the WHS out there, then it must be easier to set it up.
I don't have any problems to use the terminal, but I'm thinking about all others that wants to replace the WHS with Amahi.
If the setup ain't done in a graphical user interface, then there will be a lot of problem, that's why I can't recommend Amahi to my friends as a replacement for WHS.

[cpg]

Hello,

I think the inflammatory language (by the OP, not the rest, who answered in a classy way) was not really necessary to make the point.

The point being that Amahi needs to be easier to use, including adding drives, which the team is very aware of. The first version of Amahi did not have apps, or sharing disks, or greyhole, or VPN ... so you see, things improve over time.

More importantly, Amahi is NOT meant to be a replacement for WHS. Not sure how much we can emphasize this. Amahi aims to be the best media server, home server and hopefully, with some hardware support from vendors, next generation NAS device. These things suck today and Amahi aims to make this space suck way less. So far as I am aware, the team has not ever installed WHS, Amahi is NOT a clone of it, not even inspired by it. Amahi is not even backed by a multinational monopoly.

You want to see some feature done soon, sponsor it. We have incredibly dedicated people in the team and the community looking at apps, packaging, customizing and testing them. All to be available with a single-click install. People answering questions here in the forums, maintaining the wiki, improving documentation, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

Some of us do consulting and we'd love to work on Amahi full time, so please consider sending us a patch to implement a feature sponsoring a feature. Donate or hire us to develop a feature or fix a bug! Some of us dream of the day we can work on Amahi full time.

[swichall]

I can see what the OP is getting at, the procedure for adding extra disks to a system which is designed to be a NAS/Media Server is far to difficult for the average home user to be able to achieve.

This will put off prospective users as they will be used to the Microsoft Plug and Pray type approach.

Personally I am quite comfortable with the current approach, but for Amahi to make it big, this really needs to be resolved.

I would think that the linked task posted by cpg needs to be seen as quite high priority by the dev team for this very reason.

With the exception of adding drives being complicated, so far I am extremely impressed with Amahi as a product, in fact I have also setup XBMC to use the MySQL database installed with Amahi and its all working very well.

[papercup]

I fully understand the OP's point, and his frustration. I got a bit sweary when I first looked at that 'how to add another drive' page. Its comically complicated. 'etc/fstab'? wtf? Sorry, I'm not dim or anything but I don't know Linux from a hole in the ground and that page put me right off. Anyone that thinks its easy should remember what it was like the first day they started using Linux. For someone coming from Windows its seems needlessly complicated. It didn't work for me either; I did it 20 times and when I went into storage pool' the sodding drive wasn't there.

In the end I reinstalled and followed another thread about adding drives during first install. I've found this much easier, especially as I wanted a small drive that handled the system-y stuff (and had zero data on it), and then separate data drives.

My system has a 64GB SSD, and 5x 2TB Samsung HDDs. When I install I tick the box that says 'let me sort my own bloody partitions thank you very much' (I'm paraphrasing here). Delete all that LV crap; delete every partition on every drive, until they are all free. Then make a 500mb BOOT drive on the SSD, then a 4096mb (same as the amount of memory my system has) SWAP, then the rest of that drive as '/'.

Then you partition the first Samsung drive as one large EXT4 partition, with the mount point '/var/hda/files'. Think of that as 'Samsung1'. Then mount the 2nd Samsung the same but call it '/var/hda/files/drives/samsung2'. Then the next one? Same again, but '/var/hda/files/drives/samsung3' etc etc until you've run out of drives.

Then when you have installed Amahi you just enable advanced features, go to storage pooling and just tick all the drives; they are already there. None of that FSTAB crap to deal with

One day I might have to add another drive. I'll be screwed then!