Episode: 814
Title: HPR0814: The Knightcast KC0054 : Setting up Amahi
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0814/hpr0814.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:59:30

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On the edge of real and cyberspace there's one place you can go.
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On the edge of real and cyberspace there's one place you can go.
And you found it. Welcome to the nightcast.
The woman only podcasted TuneStack in the Away of Life and that's the technology work for you.
My name's Nightwise and for the coming 60 minutes or so I'll be your host on this episode of the nightcast entitled Amahi.
For more information and the show notes please head on over to www.nightwise.com.
That's K-N-I-G-H-T-W-I-S-E.com.
We'll find the links to everything that we talk about in the show notes and a place to plop down your feedback in the comments section.
If you're there why not subscribe to the nightwise.com content using the nightwise media feed.
In the top right corner subscribe to this RSS feed and get all of the nightwise.com content.
The screencasts, the dokecasts and the podcasts.
The live it to your favorite pod catcher automatically.
I think technology work for you.
If you want to get in touch with us you can.
Feedback at nightwise.com is the email address but you can also find it on Twitter.
That's twitter.com slash nightwise or you can use the hashtag hash deer nightwise.
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And you can also look for us on google plus and other services.
For those of you who are else please go down to nightwise.com and click on the icons on the right hand side.
Well guys and girls, been a while since we did one of these.
He sat down in the car together and I'm just yapping away talking to you doing another nightcast.
And you just sitting back listening wherever you are on how to tune tech into your way of life instead the other way around.
I might sound a little different today because my voice is kind of tired.
I've been in meetings all day long talking to a crowd and talking to lots of colleagues so my voice might be a little dry.
And it also might sound a little different because I'm using the standard apple lapel mic.
Because my boom mic is apparently broken. I will not broken the batteries are dead.
So I'll just have to resort to this means I hope you understand.
Got a fun pack show for you today. We are going to talk about Amahi, a home server that will well basically let tech work for you.
Just the way you want it with plenty of functionalities that you would like in your home and on your home network.
And the ease of use of a point and click app store a very interesting show indeed.
We have a lot to cover and we're going to get right down to it after we tell you what's up in that nightwise.com.
Ecosphere or lab or environment or planetary galaxy or community whatever.
The light cast me to the galaxy is your way of life.
Well, it's been a while since we did this and there is plenty of news to tell you before we get started.
And there are a couple of things that I do want to get out there.
First of all, if you have ever thought that in your life you're missing something really missing something like how about nightwise.com themed underway.
That question has not been answered. We have officially launched our own store with nightwise.com merchandise.
We want to thank community member and we still need a name for community members.
I mean on the Nosella cast they have the Nosella Castaways.
And well, nightwise.com doesn't really have the Nightwise Zodians? Nightwiseians? I don't know.
Whatever. Community member Lloyd Owen has become the official nightwise.com shopkeeper.
And he has set up a nice cafe press store with all kinds of funky goodies with the official nightwise.com logo on there.
So if you want to, if you want to wear your geek proudly, why not go over there and order one of those cool t-shirts, mugs, pins, or even, you know, underwear.
We have underwear. Everybody has underwear. You can't go commando, can you?
So it's out there. For those of you who want the URL, that's cafepress.com slash nightwise.
Of course, and you'll be able to pick up the merchandise. A little bit of the kickback comes to Lloyd for putting in all those hours and making all that stuff happen.
And aside from eternal fame and glory in the nightwise.com community, it also gets something for his trouble, which I think is something that he absolutely deserves because I love it.
I mean, I get to say I have branded, I get to talk to friends and say, hey, you have branded underwear. I have branded underwear.
They look at me funny when I do that. No matter. So the nightwise.com store is online. Go over there by something and there is a competition.
There is a competition that goes from now to November 5th, 2011, which is my birthday.
And that competition is if you buy something in the nightwise.com store and you make a picture of yourself in an awesome situation, like for example, on top of the Eiffel Tower, a bungee jumping down or right in front of the Natasha Mahal,
or while you're hugging Lindsay Lohan, and you are wearing a nightwise.com, I don't know, underwear or sweatshirt or t-shirt,
send us that picture because the winner will get a full refund on the item that he has purchased in the picture and I will personally pay for it.
On another note, October is coming up again. And I think it's the 19th and the 20th of October, we have the facts convention in Ghent.
For those of you who caught the last KWTV episode, we did on the whole facts thing, which is Belgium's biggest sci-fi manga and anime expo.
You still can remember that we had a very, very good time there. We had Jaspeo, Nihanna, Stifal Nassage.
And me were over there basically doing interviews and taking pictures and having a lot of fun. And this year, we're probably going to do the same.
I'm still waiting for the confirmation of our press cards. And even if you don't get any press cards, we're still going and we are taking you guys with us.
This is going to be a community event. So if you are in the Belgian area, stay tuned tonightwise.com because we will be going along with our community to the facts convention in Ghent.
And finally, last piece of news. For those of you last year who enjoyed the KWTV live shows, we did at the end of the year where we basically do a KWTV screencast but live over use stream.
And we do interviews, play music and interact with the community. Those are coming back. I just took three days off every coming month to do a KWTV live episode on Friday.
I wanted to do it on a regular basis. I wanted to do it when I had the time for it so I made the time for it.
And the whole KWTV shows will be coming back with guests and music and all the fun that we had last time.
I will be posting the dates as soon as I have them confirmed at KWTV will be yours to basically enjoy.
The time slot will be 9 or 8 to 12 a.m. GMT plus 1. It's going to be a European time slot. Well, it's not going to be very US or Australia friendly because with the spinning globe and stuff, time zones kind of differ.
And it might not be an optimal slot for you. But I had to do it because I can't get up at 3 o'clock in the morning to do a show like this. I just don't have the energy.
Well, you know, I'm on this part of the planet people deal with it. So KWTV is coming back.
That's about all the news we have for this week. It's time to get into the meat of the matter. It's time to talk about Amahi.
A fantastic Linux-based home server that will give you the powers of a super home media file serving supercomputer with the ease of point and click application adding.
Letting technology work for you. Amahi, time to get into the meat of the matter.
Before we get started, we need to take a good long look at the question, what is a server?
A server is a computer that provides services such like, for example, file sharing and print sharing to other computers in a network.
If you only have one computer in the house, having a server is not really necessary because basically you will have all of those services on your standard computer or your workstation, but it isn't like that anymore.
If you just take a look at the modern day home network, I say home network, not home computer. Because, you know, back in the days, not a lot of people had a computer and then basically everybody had a computer.
There was not a computer in the house, there was the computer in the house and the computer in the house was hooked up to a modem or a cable modem and connected to the internet.
That changed because these days there is no longer a computer, there is no longer the computer in the house, there is a computer in the house, even more than that.
There are several computers in the house and somehow, logically, homes have started to develop home networks.
Because, basically, back in the days, it was only companies who had networks. They had several computers and they needed to hook them together so they had a network and they needed a central place to store stuff so they had a server.
But in the home situation, these days, it's kind of the same. Several computers in the house and they need to access files or a printer on a shared source.
Now, as I said, they need files stored and they need printing and network management and stuff. You need, when you have a network, to have several things working for you.
You need a central place to store your files. Because, you know, the pictures that you take on your digital camera, everybody wants to access them and it's kind of handy to have them someplace in the central place on a server.
You only have one printer in the house and you want to make it easy for people in the house to print on that printer. Well, you need to have a print server running so multiple computers can print on the printer.
And you might also need network management, which means that if you get a visitor with a laptop, you hoax up to your network and he will get an IP address automatically so you don't have to configure your entire network manually.
Now, there have been several solutions to that domestic question of whole networking, many in the form of what I call an appliance.
An appliance is basically a device that's not a computer. It's like your router, that's an appliance. Or, for example, your NAS drive, that's an appliance.
Your NAS drive is actually a server. It's a little Linux server with a hard drive that does a Samba service to your network so other computers can access the files over Samba.
But, because you don't want to build your server, they put it all into a little box and they call it a NAS, a network attached service.
If you have a lot of storage and you need to add more drives as you go, you'll perhaps you've got a DROBO. DROBO can be hooked up to the network as well, serving out files.
For example, your router has a USB port that you can use to hook up a printer. Well, you can do that, basically just attach the printer to your router.
And the router will actually play, will pretend to be a print server. Or, you have media players in the house on which you can store content and those media players can play that content on your TV.
And, as I said, you also have routers which take care of the firewall and which pass out DHCP addresses and stuff like that.
Now, the pros of all of these proprietary appliances is that they are relatively cheap. These days you can get a router for almost nothing and a NAS drive doesn't cost a lot anyway.
But, there are some restrictions to that. Basically, once you buy it, that's what it's going to be. These systems are not really built for dynamic updating or added functionalities or heavy or heavy customizing.
You take a look at the packaging. It states which functionalities are on there, file serving, print serving, media playback. And that's what you're going to get.
Okay, there might be some new firmware coming out that will give you some upgrades to those services. But, it's not really very customizable. What you buy is what you get.
Now, let's say you have your home network with your central NAS drive which holds all of your data and your print server in there that shares your printer and your media player hooked up to your TV that plays back all the things that you recorded on it.
It's nice, but you have several systems flying around.
Wouldn't it be great to do something different? Wouldn't it be great to get one system that does all of those tasks?
One computer that plays a file server, a print server, and does all the routing tasks, and even gives you the ability to do more.
That solution is a server. Very simple. You can build your own server. Just take the old beige box that you have lying around or the very powerful machine that you want to give plenty of stuff to do and build your own server.
Now, a great solution to choose is a mine because you can build an out of the box server. You can build a basic server.
Let's say you take a Ubuntu server and then you install it. Then you'll have almost no functionality on there out of the box.
You'll need to set up file sharing and you'll need to set up print sharing and you'll need to set up DHCP and you'll need to set up DNS.
It all kind of is hard to do. It's very convenient and it's pretty powerful and you can do all kinds of things but you want to be able to get your hands dirty and dive into config files and read manuals and do all kinds of techy, geeky things that might require a lot of technical knowledge or a lot of time.
Wouldn't it be great to have a server with a lot of functionalities but with the ease of use of an iPhone? Just click on an application and boom, it's installed.
That is exactly what a mine is. Opposed to a classic server, like I said, your Ubuntu machine that you used to install Sam on and DHCP, that's basically the business approach of looking at a server to a home server or you point and click to add functionality.
That is what a mine is. A highly configurable, easy to use, super powerful, cheap, free and open source way to have a home server in your house that does it all.
Now, what is a mine? A mine is basically based on Fedora. Fedora is a Linux distribution that is based on the Red Hat Linux.
And here's an RPM system. So a mine starts out on a Fedora install.
It is actually an additional repository and additional layer on top of that Fedora system that will provide you with all the functionalities and possibilities that you have.
This additional repository is something that you configure during the installation of the Fedora system and it turns your standard out of the box Fedora system into an Amai server.
Once the Amai server is set up, you can do the initial configuration of the Amai server via the Internet via a special service.
And once that is complete, you can just browse the web interface of your server locally and point and click to add functionalities.
That's how easy it is. Take stock Fedora, add the Amai repository, do the first configuration online and do the second configuration or the detailed configuration using pointing click and the web interface.
Next up, we're going to take a look at how to install Amai using both the standard and the express install method.
Amai comes in two flavours and depending on your hardware or what you want to do with it, you can choose one or the other.
Let's say you say, hey nightwise, I've got an old machine lying around at home and I want to turn it into a server and you just want to plop it into a corner and configure it via the web interface and have it do all kinds of funky things for the user on my network.
But I don't want to hook up a monitor or a keyboard or stuff like that. I just want a headless command line only box.
Well, the express install of Amai is ideal for you. The express install of Amai runs on a Pentium 4 with 512 megabytes of RAM and I think about 10 gigabytes of hard drive space.
Because you want to do file sharing, you might want to add some more to there, but the minimum requirements of Amai are quite simple.
For this, you get a, after installing the express install CD, you'll get a headless box, which means that you will get a computer with a command line interface, basically blinking at the screen.
This will allow you to use cheap light hardware to offer up all of the services.
But you can also say, hey, nightwise, I've actually got something else.
I've got a pretty powerful system that I also want to use as a desktop or that I want to play around with the graphical user interface on.
Then you can go for the standard install, which is basically a Fedora install, standard Fedora install with Amai on top.
This will require a heavier computer, but you can also assign more heavier tasks, like for example, virtual machines and stuff to that server later on.
And you can also use it as a workstation.
Before we get started, the first thing you need to do is to go to Amai.org and create an account.
This is a website for Amai. You go over there, you create an account.
Then you say, I want to set up a new HDA.
HDA is a home digital assistant, which is a fancy word for your Amai server.
It is your home digital assistant. I do think the name is kind of lame.
I would have called it domestic supercomputer or how instead of HDA, which I also would have been cool.
Hello, Dave. How are you doing today?
You know, being locked out of an airlock might be traumatic for some people and being assassinated by a runaway pod,
manned by a psychotic supercomputer might have left some bad memories on the retinas of some people, so they decided to go with HDA.
So you say, I want to create a new HDA, and then they say, hey, what's your network information?
Amai before it gets to configure the server needs to know what the network parameters are on your home network.
What is your network address? What is your default gateway?
What is your subnet and which DNS servers do you want to use?
You enter this information and you can just find out all of that pretty easily by just going to one of the computers on your home network
and typing in IPcon for IFcon, depending on what you have, Linux or Windows.
And it will tell you what your IP address is, what your subnet is, what your network address is, which is basically your IP address with a zero at the end, without the last number.
And what your default gateway is. So check that out. Look that up. Your router is probably your default gateway.
Your subnet will start with 255, and your IP address might start out by 192.168 or 172.16.
Then we'll ask you, what IP address do you want to assign to your server? Then you enter the IP address of your 2B Amai server, because you want to have a static IP for that server, because let's say that's how you want to use it.
Excuse the splattering of the rain on the windshield here, but in Belgium, the Belgian idea of summer these days is a lot of clouds, a lot of rain, pretty cold, and a lot of thunderstorms.
So you might hear them smashing against the windshield. After you've entered all of that network installation, that network information, the Amai website will give you a special number.
Write down this number, because you are going to need it later on. Then you can choose to use the express install city or the standard install.
If you do the express install city, all you need to remember is that number. And if you do the standard install city, you also need to write down the address of the Amai repository.
This is a special website, actually, that your Fedora installer will use to get the extra packages used for Amai. If you use the express install city, all of those things come pre-configured.
So in this situation, because you are going to use Fedora 14, you need to write down the extra Amai repository, which is f14.amai.org.
So HTTP, f14.amai.org. It's really starting to pour down here, by the way.
So, next up, since we're going to go with the standard install, you can download the Fedora 14 DVD or the express install city, and then start looking for a box to put it on.
Now, take your Amai server, the computer that you're going to turn into an Amai server.
Make sure that there are plenty of hard drives in there, because they are going to be used for your file storage.
Make sure you have enough memory in there, at least 512 megabytes, and that the processor is a Pentium 4 or higher.
The server that we're going to set up is going to be dedicated to Amai, so make sure it's powerful enough.
So you can run Amai on it, but also use it as a workstation if you want to, and make sure that DHCP is off on your network.
Your router will probably be the DHCP server of your network. You need to disable this, because Amai is going to take care of handing out DHCP addresses.
So, the box is ready, so hooked up to your network, you have disabled DHCP, or you can do that a little bit later on after the install is complete, and you've entered the Red Hat Install City.
Start the installation, click next, next, next, make sure that you take up all of the drive, when it asks you when you want a full graphical interface, you can say yes, and start installing.
Before it installs, it will also ask you for eventual extra repositories that you want to use.
This is the moment where you enter that DHCP colon slash slash f14.amai.org.
The installation will be completed, and you will be presented with a Linux desktop, with a GNOME desktop on your Fedora system.
There will be several icons on your desktop. One of them is setup HDA. Click on this, and you will be directed to a webpage on your Amai server.
There you will be asked to enter an admin account. This is a web-based account that you will use to administer the server, and you will be directed to a web-based interface.
On this web-based interface, you can take a look at file shares, add or remove them, and file sharing users, and add or remove them.
What we are going to do with all of this basic setup information is we are going to take a look at them.
When you have entered your basic admin account, you will have the ability to add users.
Now, let's say you have several users in the house, so you are going to say mom, dad, son, and daughter.
So you want each of them to have an account and be recognized by the Amai system.
This is important because they will be accessing the system from the clients for file sharing and printing using this account.
So you make an account from mom, with a password, make an account for dad, and for the son, and for the daughter, each with a password.
And you give the people in the house these account names and passwords, because they will require them to connect to the server for file sharing or print sharing.
Then you take a look at the shares.
Amai sets up a bunch of basic Samba file shares. This means that file sharing is already operational and there are already a few shares to plop in your data.
Like for example, music, videos, documents, those are already set up.
You can use the web interface and add new shares to all of them and control the rights that who has rights and read rights to a certain share, and who can only read, and who can only write, and stuff like that.
All of that is configurable using the web interface.
And then you are done. What do you have?
What do you have out of the box after that set up process and after making those users and adjusting some shares?
What does Amai give you out of the box? Let's see.
The night test.
When you do a normal Linux install and you install the server, then you basically have the server.
There are no real services running yet, even with Ubuntu. You can select a few, but it's not really exciting. With Amai, it's completely different.
To start off, when your Amai server has been installed, you've got a web server. You can configure the Amai server via its IP address using it from any web server in the house.
So you don't have to walk up to your box. You can just configure it from wherever you want to go.
Next up, you'll have a DHCP server. Amai will take care of handing out IP addresses to devices in the house.
If you want to have specific IP addresses always assigned to the same devices, you can, using the web interface, make links between the MAC address, the hardware address of that device, and a certain IP address.
That way, anytime a device works up to your network, request the DHCP address or an IP via DHCP, it will get the same IP.
Next up, you'll have a DNS server. Now, why is that? Well, DNS servers translate host names into IP addresses.
If you type google.com, the DNS server of your provider will translate that to an IP address and direct you to the website.
Now, I know how it is with our network. Every device has an IP number. So you need to remember that IP number. If you want to go to your router, you have to remember the router's IP number.
If you want to go to your laptop, you'll have to remember the IP number that your laptop has got as being given.
Well, because of my plays the role of a DNS server, you don't need to do that anymore. Every device gets a DNS name.
During the setup, you can configure your home DNS zone. It will ask you what's going to be your DNS zone and you just enter home.com.
One thing I forgot during the setup, and I do want to mention this, is after you set up a Mahi, it will ask during the setup of your home DNS server, it will ask you for a special code.
And we talked about that code that you get on the website after you enter your website information. Enter that code because then your home DNS network is completely configured and you don't have to do all of these tedious IP address configurations yourself.
I forgot to mention that. So remember, right down after entering your network information on the Amai site, right down the special code, during the installation of a Mahi, you will ask you for this code, enter this code and your Amai system will have the right IP address and everything will be configured.
When I talked about a DNS server, what Amai will basically let you do is assign DNS names to all of those IP addresses in the house. So instead of typing 192.168.1.1 to reach your router, you can just enter router.home.com.
If you want to browse or access your Amai server, instead of typing HTTP and then the IP address of your Amai server, you can just enter HTTP, which is the DNS name of your Amai server.
Pretty cool because Amai will also take care of the DNS request for outside because if Amai doesn't know the IP number of a certain site you entered, Google.com for example, it will ask another DNS server on the internet, hey, you know the IP for Google.com.
You can tell Amai to use services like for example, Open DNS, which will also filter out bad sites and phishing sites and you can even have some parental controls on the Open DNS service.
That's a topic for another show.
Well, you also get a site from a DNS server, which is very tacky. It's a Samba server. This isn't a server where you can, you know, don't go down. No, no, no, it's file sharing.
You'll have a couple of files, file shares that you can use to share files with computers on your network. These files are already running. You've set up the user accounts to those files in the initial configuration.
And you can start dragging and dropping and sharing and reading and accessing files from all over your network right out of the box. It's like a magic NAS. It works.
Then you also get a DNS service. If you are one of those people that gets a dynamic IP from their ISP, you know how hard it is to find your way back home.
Let's say you want to connect to your home computer, you have to remember the WAN IP, the internet IP that is given to you by your provider.
If that's always the same, that's okay. You just need to remember that IP address. But some providers switch it around. They give you a dynamic IP.
So it would be cool to have a unified way to get back to your home network.
So what Amai does is give you a DNS service. It will basically keep a link between your current, internet IP and a static DNS name.
This is going to be your HDA, for example, mine is named Starscream. And it will be named Starscream. Your HDA.com.
So whenever you enter this address on any system on the planet, it will go to a specialized service and say like, hey, I've got a request for starscream.dns.yourDNA.
I've got a request for starscream.yourHDA.com. Where is that computer? Well, says the DNS server.
The last time the computer checked in, it was on that internet IP. Because that is what your system will do.
It will frequently update its own internet IP address to yourHDA.com service. So when you enter the name of your Amai box, starscream.yourHDA.com,
you'll be automatically directed to the current and correct internet IP of your service, enabling you to find your way home all the time.
Now, you say, what's that good for? I mean, what does that get me? Well, you can forward ports and access your server via SSH.
But you can do something that is way more cooler. Because out of the box, Amai will give you a VPN server. You can VPN into your own home network.
So from any computer in the world running a VPN client, and there are plenty of manuals on the Amai site that are very simple and very clear on how to install a VPN client on your system,
you can connect through a VPN tunnel to your home network, basically being able to access all of those services on your home network.
Which is pretty cool. I mean, it's all out of the box. It works just like that. That's awesome. And that's the awesome thing about Amai.
So that's what you get out of the box, but we're only getting started. So what's up next? What are we going to do?
Well, to be careful here, because I got a pretty, you know, I've got people who are, you know, not used to driving in busy traffic and are very a social will never mind. Now, what are we going to do?
We are going to do more with your Amai server. We're going to add some more functionalities to it. But first we're going to see what we have.
Well, we've got a place to share files. We have a place that does our, we have a server that controls our entire network, hands out IP addresses, does DNS, and we can access our home network from anywhere using a VPN client all out of the box.
Those are basic installs, but we're only getting started because there is more. And what that is is the point and click edition of apps, the power of a Linux server with the ease of use of an iPhone.
We're going to see what we get for that point and click functionality.
I told you about the web interface of Amai. You can go there and you can set up users and you can set up files and look at the state of your server, basically looking at how much space you've got left on your hard drives all from the browser, all pretty simple.
But there is also a tab there that says apps. And these apps are free applications or basically services that you can add just out of the box by clicking on them, by selecting an application, clicking on it, and Amai will automatically install, configure and start the service that you want to use.
I'll give you some examples of apps that are standing by for you to click on that are absolutely free.
First of all, explore. Explore is a web-based file manager. So think about Windows Explorer. And think about Windows Explorer in a web page.
So if you want to upload files to your server, download files to your server, take a look at files in your server, even connect to an FTP server from your server inside a web page, explore will do it for you.
Click on Explorer, go to your HDA using your browser, click on the, you will automatically see the Explorer icon, click on there, and then you'll have a complete file manager in your browser, which you can use to access your server, upload and download files all via HTTP.
Pretty cool. Well, you can go a little bit further. You can, using the same browser, have a terminal.
You don't need a terminal client, you don't need to install putty to have a terminal on your server. What if you want to, you know, rummage around in a terminal, you can install Ajax Term, which will create an Ajax browser on your server that you can access via the website.
Via your browser, you can open up a terminal and type away on your server using nothing but a browser. That's Ajax Term.
What if you have a lot of music and you want to play that via a browser on all of your systems in your home network or on all of those systems were connected via VPN? Well, you can use Empachi.
Click on Empachi, point Empachi towards the music and most of the time that already works because Amahi has set up a special folder for you where you can drop off your music.
So if you click on Apache and you say like, hey, dude, play my music in a browser, Apache already knows, well, that's probably where the music will be.
And there are other services as well for sharing photos and for example, sharing a calendar, all via a web based interface on your server.
It's like a cloud service in your own network. If you have Firefox installations and you want to sync up a bookmark from one installation to the other, but you don't want to use some cloud service like Foxmark, you can even have a Firefox bookmark sync server running just by point and clicking.
How about PHP admin and PHP backup so you can, you know, if you're into web services and web serving and web hosting and stuff like that, play around with PHP using a web interface.
All of those applications are right there and they are just just a few of some of them that are right there and you can just click on them and they will be automatically installed and automatically started so it all works.
You don't have to do anything. But that's only half of it. Those are the out of the box possible applications that you can install.
There is an entire store for Amahi users and they don't call it the App Store. They used to call it the App Store and then Apple came and Apple said, Hey, Amahi, you cannot use the word App Store.
So Amahi had to, you know, think of something else. But just to take Apple off to make the really annoyed, I'm going to use the word App Store because that's what it is.
And App Store, if Apple patents the word Apple, we've got a serious problem for people who like apples. They will have to refer to the green stuff that hangs in the trees because Apple has patented the word Apple.
Perhaps it will never happen. We thought so with the word App Store as well. Now look what it got us.
But on the App Store, Magnag, you can even buy more. What you do is you go to Amahi.org and you log in. Then you will get a selection of applications that you can buy in the App Store.
There are some free ones out there and there are also some paid ones out there. You pay for them using PayPal by basically buying credit in the App Store.
You'll get a little ticker that says you've got 10 euros to spend and those 10 euros can be spent buying applications.
So log into the Amahi Store. I have chucked $10 on PayPal and you can start clicking away. For example, let's see what we can do with our 10 euros.
One of them is Amahi tunes. Remember that you've got iTunes running on some of your systems and iTunes is a pretty cool way to share music.
Well, why not put all of your music in your music folder on your Amahi machine and click on Amahi tunes.
Next time you launch up any system that runs iTunes, they will spot a shared iTunes library just like you do in iTunes.
But this shared iTunes library is actually your music library on your Amahi server that propagates or broadcasts a iTunes server to all your iTunes clients.
I absolutely love it. I chuck all of my iTunes music on my Amahi server and I've installed my iTunes and now I can just stream that music throughout the house on my iTunes using whatever client that I want to have.
Let's say you really like BitTorrent so you're downloading on your computer and your wife says come to bed, shut down your computer.
Would it be cool to have those downloads continued during the night?
Well, you can install Transmission which is a web-based BitTorrent client on your Amahi server.
So you just go to your Amahi server via the web interface, upload the Torrent to Transmission and Amahi will do the rest.
It will download the file in your downloads folder and then you can access it via Samba the next day or whenever it's done.
How about a Wiki? Yeah, you can do a Wiki online but it's even cooler to do a Wiki on your own land.
For example, you're really into Smurfs. You love Smurfs. You really into them and you want to do a Wiki on Smurfs. But it's a secret Wiki.
And you can say, yeah, I can do the Wiki on the internet and do an access code but I really don't trust anybody.
It's really secret. It's about Smurfs and it's secret and it's mine.
Well, that's okay. You can just very easily set up your own Wiki on your own Amahi server accessible only to the people on your own network or to the ones that can dial in via VPN.
So you can just download Donkyu Wiki. Click, point, install and it's there on your web interface of Amahi.
Let's say you're into Google Reader. You love RSS feeds. You love RSS feeds about Smurfs.
But you don't want to share them with Google because you don't trust Google because Google is red, yellow and Smurfs are blue and that can never be a good combo.
So you want your own Google Reader on your own Amahi box. Well, just click on our news and then you have your own RSS web-based reader just like Google Reader on your own server.
It gives you bragging rights but you can also browse RSS feeds about Smurfs in private. So you want to share that information about Smurfs.
And you say like, wow, I want a WordPress blog to blog about Smurfs. But I don't want anybody to read it. Just me.
Or you just want to play around with WordPress without going public. You can just click on WordPress and boom, you'll have a WordPress server running on your own Amahi machine where you can experiment with WordPress and do all kinds of funky things in your own private network or basically blog about Smurfs all day without having anybody being aware of your passion about Smurfs.
And one of the functionalities that I love the most, the DLNA server. I've got a lot of movies. I put the movies on the server. Now when I want to play the movies, I need to take a computer and browse to the folder with the movies in there on the network and play the movies that way.
Well, that's cool. Then I want to watch the movies on my TV. Well, I have to hook up my computer to the TV and access the somershare and click on the movie and play the movie that way.
But it's even cooler. It can get even cooler. Amahi has a DLNA server, which is a protocol. DLNA stands for Digital Lifestyle Network Association. But it's basically a language.
It's a language between systems who have content and systems who can play content. And that doesn't necessarily have to be a computer that can be just about anything.
So when I've done, I've installed the Amahi DLNA server on my Amahi box. Then I went to my Xbox. And I said, hey, Xbox, are there any media centers around here?
And the Xbox says, well, yes, there are. I see an Amahi system over there and it speaks DLNA. You want me to connect? I say, yes, please do.
And then from my Xbox, I can just browse through the folders with my music and my movies and stream them flawlessly on my Xbox on our TV.
I also installed a DLNA client on my iPad. And now I'm upstairs and I said, geez, I really want to play that movie on my Amahi server.
But Steve says, no, you cannot, you cannot access somershares. You cannot just browse files, but you can play DLNA content if you install a DLNA application.
So I installed a DLNA client and now I can stream whatever content that I want that is on my server over the network just like that.
Those are just a few of the possibilities of what you can do with Amahi. I spent 10 euros in the Amahi store and I've got all this functionality at home for me to play with. And it really, really works for me.
I'll just give you a little rundown of the tasks that my server performs at home and then we'll round up.
Okay, time for some geek bragging. I had two options to install my Amahi server and I do want to thank Truck Lover, which is one of the fans of Nightwise.com who pointed me towards Amahi for showing me Amahi and showing me the light that is Amahi.
And now I have all kinds of funky stuff at home without having to be an advanced network system administrator to get them running.
I had two options. I've got an ACES EEE box, which is a light system that doesn't consume any power.
I also have an I5 4GB server with one terabyte hard drive and two external one terabyte disks and I also have that one lying around.
So I was kind of thinking, what am I going to do? I'm going to do the light server where I'm just going to have Amahi be a server server and that's it.
I can do that on the EEE box or do I also want to use it for other things.
So what I have at home is the I5 server with four gigs of RAM and basically three terabytes of storage and it's headless.
It's underneath our staircase and just sits there. But what does it do?
First of all, it does Amahi. I did the basic Fedora 14 install and I installed Amahi.
So I've got all of the VPN stuff working, all of the Amahi stuff working.
I can VPN into my house and I've set up the VPN client in such a way, the VPN server in such a way that I get an inside IP address.
So I get an IP address inside the range of my local LAN.
Now I want to explain this, if you VPN in as a client, you get a separate subnet between the VPN client and your Amahi server.
I want to get an IP address from the subnet that is the same of all of my other devices.
That way I can access all of my other devices in the network from anywhere.
So I can just daily using VPN and just enter an IP address of any device on my home network and go straight through the Amahi box to that device.
I also have SSH. I can SSH into my house and have a command line interface to my house and run file Zilla on there.
Plenty of stuff that you can do with SSH.
If I want to stream music that's on my home server, from anywhere I can use Apache.
So I've got Apache installed. I open up my browser, enter the address of my HDA and stream music from home even when I'm not at home.
I've got the DLNA server, which I absolutely love.
And the morning when I'm on the cross trainer, I've got the iPad in front of me and I just go to the DLNA server and choose whatever I want to watch.
For the moment I'm streaming through Deep Space 9 Season 2 on the cross trainer and it works absolutely flawlessly.
It works better than the whole file sharing streaming that you can do with VLC and stuff.
Absolutely fantastic.
I run crash plan on it, which means that I've got a crash plan client installed on it and all of my other computers make their backups to my crash plan server on my Amahi server.
So all of the backups in the house are automatically directed to my crash plan server.
I've got a file explorer so I can have a web based interface to my Amahi server and to all of my files when I need to.
I've got iTunes sharing up and running and I've installed some other services which are not basically Amahi but which are just Linux services.
I've got some virtual machines running on that same server, I think two at the moment.
So virtual machines that run on the Amahi server in the background that I can just access whenever I want to.
And let's see what else I have.
I've installed an NX server.
So my Fedora or Amahi server is also kind of a terminal server for all of my other machines in the house.
And I can just call up an entire Linux desktop wherever I am working from.
But that's kind of the geeky stuff but it's all a collection of some of the things that I've already mentioned in the previous Nightcast podcast.
So time to round up, say what you think about it by and say our goodbyes.
So
so
so
very long show today.
I'm sorry to keep nagging on but a lot of technical content to get through and I mean it would have been bad if I would have been talking about the installation for an hour and just talking about the possibilities of Amahi for 10 minutes.
Instead I've been talking about the installation for 10 minutes and the possibilities of Amahi take over an hour to tell you.
So I'm very very pleased with Amahi.
It's point and click set up. I absolutely love it. It's free, it's functional, it works.
The documentation on the Amahi website is very very well well done and it does help me to easily configure whatever I needed to configure.
But most of the time it was really point, click and everything worked.
So I would highly recommend Amahi to you if you want to try it out, try it out in a virtual machine or if you want to install it on a box, go right ahead.
You'll be amazed at the results that you get after 20 minutes of geeking out.
You need to know a little bit about your home network to get started but once you've got that written down it's a walk in the park.
Amahi is the power of a Linux server with the convenience of a home appliance and the expandability of an App Store.
I absolutely love it and I want to thank both Amahi and the guys in the Amahi chat room for building this great product.
I want to thank truck lover for pointing me towards Amahi and letting me explore all its possibilities. I absolutely love it.
So that's all we have time for this week on the edge of real and cyberspace.
You know where to go for your feedback. We'll be back next week with Adobe Cast or a screencast and that's going to round it up for today.
Please don't forget to, if you're listening to this show, Twitter about it. We need some more Twitter followers.
We need to get more people into the community. If you're listening to the show, why not tweet about it or post it on your Facebook or on your Google Plus
wherever you are on social networks and have more people explore the Nightwise.com website and all of the content that we do here.
I am done of almost home. Been talking to you for almost an hour straight and my throat is getting sore.
So I'm going to leave it at that. I'll see you on the flip side on the edge of real and cyberspace where you're letting technology work for you.
Instead the other way around. See you. Bye bye.
Thanks for coming to the edge of real and cyberspace. You have been listening to the Nightcast.
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