Thanks to the long holiday weekend, I was able to install Fedora 9 (refered to as f9 from here out) and Amahi home server installed and running. So far so good. There were a few speed bumps, mostly in the installation of f9. Once that was done, I was up in no time.

I started with the f9 install dvd. I forgot that my machine had a cd rom so I had to take a dvd rom out of another machine and put it in that one. No problem. Then following the instructions from Amahi, I added the Amahi repository during the installation. The first problem arose when I moved forward to complete the install of f9. Suddenly it was asking me for Fedora disk 1. I was using the full install dvd, so there was no disk 1. Well, I thought, I better download disk 1. So I did and burnt it to a cd. After putting it in the drive, It still told me that I had the wrong disk and asked me to insert disk 1. Ok so now I know that this is an actual problem. With lots of searching I learned that f9 doesn’t like it when you add repositories during installation. I don’t know why but when I started over without adding the Amahi repository, it worked just fine.

Once the install was done, it rebooted and I had to log in as root because the Amahi instructions tell you not to create any users. You create them later in Amahi after it is installed. So before installing Amahi I wanted to update f9 but it just wasn’t working. It kept telling me there were updates and when I opened the updater it just wouldn’t do anything. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Finally I learned that the GUI updater will not update when you are logged in as root. I was able to update via the terminal using yum update. So now I was all patched up and ready to install. I had to use the instructions from the Amahi wiki to complete the install.

It was very straight forward. From there the last thing I had to do was turn off my DHCP in Astaro to allow Amahi to handle it. Then I also had to change my DNS settings. I had my DNS configured manually to use OpenDNS. So when I was trying to go to Amahi in my browser at http://hda , OpenDNS didn’t know what I was trying to do. When I changed my settings to get DNS automatically, it worked. Plus Amahi uses OpenDNS anyway so I wasn’t losing the security that provides.

The “shares” as they are called were simple to connect to my Windows machines. It worked just as it did when I connected to my FreeNAS drives. Connecting in Ubuntu wasn’t so easy. You can read how that was solved in the Amahi wiki. I joined the IRC chatroom and spoke to several people there. One of them (I think he’s the Amahi developer) helped me find the solution and asked me to document it there in the wiki. The people in the chatroom were incredibly helpful and kind. Even on a holiday weekend (at least here in the U.S.) there were one or two people there all the time ready to talk and help. It was a great experience and I’m excited about it’s many features. The active community seems to be planning more applications to supplement it as well.

Using Amahi not only gives me a great file server built on a solid foundation in f9 but it has several other cool features that my old FreeNAS server just didn’t have. We now have a household wiki where my wife and I can document information and things that need to be shared. AmahiTunes feeds your music to iTunes. WeightTracker is a cool little tool as well. I used it this morning. Being someone who tries to watch his weight, I can keep it updated and track fluctuations over time. It has a built in Bittorrent program too. I haven’t used Bittorrent in a long time but it will be great to have when I need to download the latest release of Ubuntu or Fedora. It has backup utilities so you can keep your files and systems backed up. It’s all accessed very easily from any browser on the network.

I’m still new to the Linux world and I’m always learning. I’ve definitely learned from this experience and I’ve enjoyed it. I hope that if you’ve read this you give it a try because it’s worth it.