What is Reddit's opinion of Amahi Home Server?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

>What parts should I buy?

• That depends on many factors including the space, both storage and physical, you need, and the heat and noise you can have in the room.

• Protected power (UPS) and network access may impact placement, plan for it.

• Do you want RAID? Remember, it isn't a backup, just an extra layer of redundancy. You will still need a backup solution.

• If your cost ceiling includes the cost of hard drives, wait a while, they are just starting to return to normal prices. You will save a lot waiting a month or two.

• If you are wanting just NAS software, FreeNAS and UnRaid are very popular.

• If you want a full server, Amahi is the best no cost solution.

~~NOTE: I WILL BE BACK IN A HALF HOUR TO POST MY LAST SERVER BUILD AFTER I GET IT FROM A RETIRED HDD.~~

Can't afford to - tiny opensource startup has no money to have a legal battle with behemoth like apple. If anyone is going to do that it'll have to be the other big boys like Amazon and Microsoft.

Amahi would be much better off to take the free publicity and change the name of the store to something cheeky but not trademark infringing(I see the current favourite on this site is iStore).

Here's a pretty good lookin' option from life hacker http://lifehacker.com/5332535/amahi-turns-old-systems-into-full-featured-media-servers I helped my bro set this up and it wasn't all that difficult and it has quite a few apps that can be used with it as well anyways here's the link if you want to check it out http://www.amahi.org/

Another vote for Amahi, it's relatively speaking a drop-in replacement for WHS, and is the reference platform for Greyhole, which was mentioned by atka as the DE alternative.

amahi.org

I just finished setting up an Amahi server in my basement. I use it mostly to stream my MKV, MP4, and AVI videos to a Western Digital TV Live Plus and a PS3 via DLNA, but I also added the AmahiTunes FireFly server so all the music on the box shows up in RhythmBox and iTunes.

Conversely I run fedora but the past year I have been running Windows Server 2012r2 and am about to wipe it and go back to Fedora.

I highly suggest that you try a command line version/server version instead. It takes up so much less resources and there are tons of guides out there to help you along the way. Especially the Ubuntu community. They are much less hostile to new people who want to learn but don’t know how to interprets the documentation.

Edit: I should mention that I began my Linux learning with Amahi. http://www.amahi.org/

In terms of a Linux distro, might I recommend Amahi. It's pretty well pre-built as a Plex server, and if you don't mind paying a couple of bucks for the one-click installs, it's as easy as a Linux install gets.

Full disclaimer: I'm not done configuring it yet, but so far so good.

I have been running Amahi for around 3 years. It is great, super easy to setup and even easier to get access to everyone. For media streaming you can use the Jinzora plugin, there is already built in plugin built for it. Jinzora /should/ work with most if not all modern browsers. Amahi Jinzora Link :: http://www.amahi.org/apps/jinzora Jinzora SF Link :: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jinzora/

As far as media server and the server application, I'm running an AMD Sempron 3000+. It's 1.8 GHz, and came out summer 2004 and it works just fine. The server application requirements are quite minimal. The same machine, matched with an old 2004 era socket 754 mobo, some new ram, and PCI raid controllers and a PCI gigabit ethernet interface is serving up my home with 9TB. It's also running a 24 hour cloud backup (via Crashplan), SABnzbd, CouchPotato, Sickbeard, Apache, DHCP and DNS services, and a few other things that aren't on the top of my head. I can stream 1080p content to multiple connections simultaneously without hiccups. The caveat, you've got to run linux to get this kind of functionality out of old equipment. That said, all the clients in the house run windows (7, Vista, and XP). I do not transcode on the server though, the old hardware can't handle it. I use my gaming rig overnight to run any transcoding services. I'm an advocate of Amahi which makes all of this easy for non-linux savvy users, like myself.

TL;DR - Old 2004 era hardware expanded via PCI raid/ethernet, run lots of server apps 24/7, 1080p video streamed throughout the house, no transcoding, spend one saturday and setup Amahi on Fedora 14.

Off the top of my head:

Investigate Greyhole or just install Amahi which has it built in.

Debian base is nice, but are you thinking of running VM's? It might pay to consider VMWare ESXi, XenServer Free or Proxmox. You could also do Xen or KVM manually...

Get as much ram as the motherboard will take. I have a half built box sitting by my feet that has 32Gigs in it. Ram is cheap - I say this as a New Zealander: we're at the arse end of international shipping lines so electronic/computer hardware can be fucking expensive here compared to say, Australia or the States.

If you can afford it, chuck a small SSD into the mix and look into bcache or flashcache.

I use amahi "Amahi is software that runs on a dedicated PC as a central computer for your home. It handles your entertainment, storage, and computing needs." It offers nice static local IP control, and does a ton of other things that I cannot live without. And of course, it's free.

It depends what you want:

Something that's an easy project where you get results but don't learn much linuxy stuff, or something where you may have to roll your sleeves up and massage some conf files and daemons.

I'm a Debian sysadmin so I'll always have a bias there, but for an easy option a'la 'Windows Home Server', Amahi is very good...

Amahi is a great option for this. It is very similar to Windows Home Server feature wise but built around Ubuntu and thus free. The Amahi website does a better job of describing all it can do.

Amahi is a great data bucket that sits on top of Fedora. It uses Greyhole, which isn't raid, but offers redundancy by data replication. Once setup, you assign samba shares. These shares can then be told to replicate the data on them to 1 extra disc, two extra disc, etc. Its something of a fake raid 1, only over as many discs as you like. The best part is that you can just keep adding discs without any concern about breaking and making new raid arrays. The cons are that this replication inst done real time( once a day by default) and you won't get the speed advantage of a raid 5.

From the Amahi FAQ: http://www.amahi.org/faq#do-you-support-fedora-15

>### Do you support Fedora 15? > >No. Fedora 15 has major changes to the underlying distribution. That can mean instability, which is a major no-no in Amahi. >We may wait until Fedora 16 comes along, hence skipping Fedora 15 support.

So it is not really a choice at this time. Amahi is a pretty incredible project and it is definitely most stable on F14, although there is an Ubuntu version that is pretty beta.

I've tried Amahi Home Server before, which was pretty cool. Runs off Fedora.

If you make it your DNS/DHCP server, it's a convenient home server with an easy VPN setup as well. A bunch of intranet apps for file sharing, streaming, calendars/contacts/mail, etc.

Have you tried Amahi?

Free and lots of one-click install apps. Been using it for a year, even set it up to automatically backup my father's laptop everyday (he's a trucker). Hosting a website/blog, a family gallery, and a music streaming website as well.

Pretty neat.

I second that. My FreeNAS has been running for years, nearly non-stop with no issues, and does everything the "off the shelf" models can, usually more. Also take a look at Amahi: http://www.amahi.org Built in file serving, video and audio streaming and transcoding, DNS service, greyhole... Hell I run a public minecraft server off mine on a Pentium D, recycle that old hardware...

You should look into Amahi its a Fedora based home server OS. It doesn't do RAID but offers file/folder level redundancy which I think is preferable in a home setting. Built in VPN and SSH clients if you like. UPNP built in and simplified app extension. I have a Windows Home Server based systme now and plan on switching to Amahi when the time comes.

Here is an explanation of how Amahi manages drive redundancy.

I personally find this solution preferable to RAID b/c if say you have a catastrophic crash you can pull the data off the drives by plugging them into a separate machine.

Make a partition on the main HDD and install whatever would work best. Im guessing soe sort of linux.... possible things to check out are freenas to just make a server that everyone can access. Also, I have no experience yet but will be installing on a new build this week, check out amahi it allows networking, streaming, also access from out of the house.

also, what OS are you planning on putting on it. you may want to look into Amahi as it does streaming, and disk pooling (main point of this is to skip the raid so as to simplify things.

Have you heard of Amahi? It's a Fedora–based home server software that requires minimal work to set up, run, and operate, which has many useful features as well. It might not be for power users who want to manually set up a server themselves and have supreme control over everything, but if you know what you're doing you can still edit your samba.conf and whatnot. It's great software., in my opinion, for those who aren't Linux experts or power-users.