Amahi Forums

I am building a AMAHI server for my son, he is coming visiting this weekend, so I have to get it working.

i created a VLAN for 192.168.1.1 with standard NATing and the like with DHCP from my firewall.

I did the Feodra 10 install with the AMAHI repo. One deviation I did was to perform the YUM UPDATE before the install-hda.

So now I am all done with the install. I have the DHCP off on the firewall. The AMAHI server can PING the internet. I click on the desktop ICON for the Dashboard and Firefox gives me a message about "you are looking for HDA, but that domain is not on this server." and I get redirected to www.anything.com

So what went wrong with what should be a simple setup.

i created a VLAN for 192.168.1.1 with standard NATing and the like with DHCP from my firewall.

Why a VLAN? Is the server to reside on your machine in a virtual environment or are you trying to create an HDA for your son to take with him when he leaves?

I did the Feodra 10 install with the AMAHI repo. One deviation I did was to perform the YUM UPDATE before the install-hda.

The installation command of "hda-install YOURCODEHERE" needs to be done before the YUM -Y Update is executed.

So now I am all done with the install. I have the DHCP off on the firewall. The AMAHI server can PING the internet. I click on the desktop ICON for the Dashboard and Firefox gives me a message about "you are looking for HDA, but that domain is not on this server." and I get redirected to http://www.anything.com

First turn DHCP back on in your firewall and follow the instructions at the following link: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Network_Troubleshooting

So what went wrong with what should be a simple setup.

Have you taken a look at the installation manual? You can find it at the following link: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/User_Manual

i created a VLAN for 192.168.1.1 with standard NATing and the like with DHCP from my firewall.

Why a VLAN? Is the server to reside on your machine in a virtual environment or are you trying to create an HDA for your son to take with him when he leaves?

I have a LOT of VLANs here for different lab (and production) environments. I wanted to 'emulate' what the system would have actually running in my son's apartment.

I did the Feodra 10 install with the AMAHI repo. One deviation I did was to perform the YUM UPDATE before the install-hda.

The installation command of "hda-install YOURCODEHERE" needs to be done before the YUM -Y Update is executed.

Why? I did a yum update after the hda-install CODE, and there was nothing to do. Also on MY server, I had a problem with RAIL when I was changing my CODE from an old one to a newly created on, and that server is working fine with the hda-install being run after the update.

So now I am all done with the install. I have the DHCP off on the firewall. The AMAHI server can PING the internet. I click on the desktop ICON for the Dashboard and Firefox gives me a message about "you are looking for HDA, but that domain is not on this server." and I get redirected to http://www.anything.com

First turn DHCP back on in your firewall and follow the instructions at the following link: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Network_Troubleshooting

Well there is one real problem I discovered. I did not change the domain from the default 'home.com'. And a 'ping -n hda' comes back with IP address 66.114.124.140, so that can be the problem that when I do http://hda it is going out to that host and it is not accepting HTTP.

So can I change the home domain? I don't see how in the online Control Panel. Would changing it in the database with phpMyAdmin be needed?

So what went wrong with what should be a simple setup.

Have you taken a look at the installation manual? You can find it at the following link: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/User_Manual

Yes I read it. This is not my first install. Of course this one I tried to go 'by the book', other than the order of 'yum update'.

Some more information...

I created a new profile with a TLD of .home so it would NOT resolve to a valid host.

I deleted the /etc/sysconfig/amahi-hda file and hda-install ed the new code.

(side question, how do I delete the old profile).

I then tried http://hda and got the error again. But 'host hda' responses with the local RFC1918 address of the server. I then tried http://localhost and that got me into the dashboard.

So there is something wrong here. Firefox is set up to use 'system proxy settings' (just like my system that IS working). So how do I find out what the 'system proxy settings' are?

I noticed that although I had fixed the domain name in the profile, the server's host name was still hda.home.com

Worst, when I looked in /etc/hosts, there was a line:

66.114.124.140 hda.home.com hda

WOW!!! would that mess things up!

So I deleted that line and fixed up the 127.0.0.1 line to have the new domain name.

I also had to edit /etc/sysconfig/network to fix up hostname there.

Now things are working properly http://hda brings up the dashboard.


Lesson: THOU SHALL NOT use a domain name such that hda.yourdomain is a valid server out there on the internet.

RECOMMENDATION: Change the install so that the domain CANNOT be in a valid TLD.

Whew.

There is a problem when you go through this process of changing your registration code to change your domain. The database table, settings gets another set of values with the new settings, but the old settings are still there in old rows. This presents problems for SOME things in AMAHI. So I had to install phpMyAdmin (and there are STILL problems with installing this app) to fix that table...

Sigh. You have one chance to get it right, it seems. Otherwise you have to know quite a bit to fix things.

ok. i did not follow all that.

the first post, which was an issue after the install, did not have any useful debugging information, i.e. "it did not work."

obviously, we have optimized for a typical home network. a lot of people get it at the first try. we actually care that that is the case.

it is also the case that the more sophisticated the user the more troubles he/she gets into. it's typical of techies to try and push the envelope.

networking is a bitch, when it doesn't work. so it's hard to recover from failures.

anyway, enough pontificating. if we could have the information as to exactly what failed and perhaps remote access to the HDA, we would improve Amahi to handle more and more cases, for sure. any way to recover that?

The default domain is 'home.com'. This causes a real problem in the install.

There is a REAL system out on the net of 'hda.home.com'. Because of this, something, most likely FC10 installer, put a line in /etc/hosts:

66.114.124.140 hda.home.com hda

Further this host does not seem to be running a web server. Perhaps because of this, when you try http://hda, you fail to connect. Then FIrefox, in its wisdom, directs you to anything.com.

So the 'root' problem is the default domain of 'home.com'. It might have worked once for whatever reason, it does not work as of yesterday at least. So the default domain needs to be something else; I recommend 'home.amahi'. Whatever it is there can't be a host out on the net with whatever the hostname for the server is.

Now to 'fix' this problem was hard, and I still do not know if I have cleaned everything up.

First the AMAHI online profile needs a different domain name. As there does not seem to be anyway to change this online, I created a new profile. Changing the profile on my server (running hda-install code) creates more problems. So now I have a server that seems to be working, but I am not sure I cleaned up all references to 'home.com'. I guess an 'inexperienced user' would not try to fix there server once they learned that they could not use the default domain of home.com; they would have started at the beginning, doing a fresh install.

Does this help?

yes, it helps.

yes hda.home.com resolves to 66.114.124.140 in the net at large.
(which does run a web server for a

however, this is what a virgin fedora install looks like:
so the only explanation i have is that

- you called your system hda and you set the domain as home.com in the fedora installer and
- fedora somehow looked up that address and put it there ?!?!?!

how is the rest of your /etc/hosts related to that?

maybe we need to change the instructions to instruct users to leave the localdomain there.

we're transitioning to a "kickstart" installer which will make things a bit more homogeneous.

the suggestion we had discussed is to default to "home.local" which probably makes sense, but it's not as cool.

yes, it helps.

yes hda.home.com resolves to 66.114.124.140 in the net at large.
(which does run a web server for a

however, this is what a virgin fedora install looks like:

Code: Select all

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost hda-vm ::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

so the only explanation i have is that

- you called your system hda and you set the domain as home.com in the fedora installer and
- fedora somehow looked up that address and put it there ?!?!?!

how is the rest of your /etc/hosts related to that?

Yes. I did set my Fedora installer for hda.home.com. Taking the 'simple consistency' approach, I set the install to match. Obviously a bad choice. The other lines of my /etc/hosts were:

maybe we need to change the instructions to instruct users to leave the localdomain there.

I don't like that solution. If we are going to offer an email solution, there are email components that normally leverage off the hostname. I know I read that somewhere...

we're transitioning to a "kickstart" installer which will make things a bit more homogeneous.

the suggestion we had discussed is to default to "home.local" which probably makes sense, but it's not as cool.

"home.amahi" is cool.

BTW, I have a testbed for my HIP protocol. There I run my own TLD of .htt for the DNS test portion. So as you know, it is easy to add your own TLD to BIND for your local needs. You can even do it in a public-facing DNS server using zones (been there, done that).