Amahi Problems
For some time now, I have been running an
Amahi Home Server on one of the desktops that I built. I was initially very excited about the Fedora based home server, but ran into many problems. It ran great when I had one hard drive, but when I bought an SSD and two 2 TB drives I ran into trouble. I followed the directions on
how to add a second hard drive, but they didn't work. I had to learn how to edit the fstab file and mount the drives myself, which I did and am now grateful for knowing. After mounting the two drives, I added them to the
Greyhole shares. Every time I tried transferring the files over the network, the 32 GB SSD would fill up and the transfers to the 4 TB of space would fail. I wiped the system and partitioned the drives on the clean install
following these directions. Now the SSD never filled up, but the transfers still failed. I even tried
mounting the shares locally and transferring the files via USB hard drives, but that failed too. One of my main purposes of using an Amahi server was so I could stream my movies remotely and I never could. The
Amahi app Jinzora said that it could do that, but it was never able to stream any of my movies, no matter what format the files were (mp4, wmv, avi, mov).
Great things about Amahi
Videos 5 was the best thing about Amahi. I could stream all of my mp4 movies to any HTML5 capable browser, such as the iPad. It worked quite well.
Ubuntu and Tonido
I have wiped Fedora and Amahi and installed 64 bit Ubuntu 10.10 on the same desktop. I setup Samba shares on it, so all computers on my home network will have read and write access to the files on that computer. I then installed
Tonido on it. Tonido is great because it's like setting up my own personal cloud. I initially ran into issues because they don't have a 64 bit installer for Ubuntu, but after
following these directions, I was able to install it and get it running. I can now access all of my files remotely and stream all of my movies!
Does Tonido offer the drive-pooling/data protection that greyhole does? Or is this an apple/oranges comparison?
ReplyDeleteI am a big fan of Amahi and the Fedora distrobution. I tried to use Greyhole for a little while and found out that it wasn't for me. I SFTP into my server a lot and having the files get moved around (automatically and this is by design) confused me. I decided to go the route of LVM because it has been well supported by the Linux community. I could add drives of different capacities to this pool of combined storage space. When I need more capacity, I just get another drive and extend the logical volume that's formated as ext3. This has worked well for me a while. I looked into Tonido a while back but found that Amahi was a much better fit for what I needed from a server.
ReplyDeleteGreg - Tonido does not offer drive pooling protection that greyhole does. With Greyhole running, I never could get my files transferred onto the machine I had Amahi running on. It was my #1 reason I wanted Amahi, but it wasn't very useful to me since I wasn't able to get my files onto it. I had wiped the machine about 10 times and tried every option I could, but alas I have settled for a good backup system instead. I am going to setup daily/weekly/monthly backups of all the files onto an external hard drive, with the intent to also FTP to a remote location in the future. It is somewhat apples and oranges, but not completely. While I don't have drive pooling, I do get remote access to all of my files and a media streaming application for all of my personal movie collection.
ReplyDeletetrucklover - I hadn't tried the LVM method. That's a great tip. If I find that Tonido isn't working for me, I may try to switch back to Amahi and try LVM.
Did you know: Videos5 is open-source, and available to all for download?
ReplyDeletehttp://code.google.com/p/videos5/
i.e. it's not Amahi-specific. You can install it on Ubuntu if you'd like (which is what I do myself).
About LVM: you need to be careful on what you put on a LVM volume, and how you back it up. If any of the drive in the LVM volume fails, you will loose ALL DATA from ALL DRIVES in that volume. I think you can RAID-1 LVM volumes, but that seems like a lot of wasted space.
Sorry Greyhole wouldn't work for you. It works #1 for me! :)
Cheers,
With Greyhole you have to adjust its landing zone so as not to 'fill' the small drive. The greyhole process runs every 24 hours and shuffles the data around then.
DeletePersonally, I think LVM over RAID is the safest/sanest way to configure your disks. Best of both worlds and you won't lose TB of data.
For streaming, I have found TVMobili far better than any of the streamers out there. It just replaced PS3 Media Server. Both of which run outside of amahi, but run on the same box.
SickBeard, CouchPotato, Sabnzbd+ and TVMobili == Streaming Heaven!
Thanks for the little insight into the reasoning for utilizing Ubuntu. I have been curious as to its use because I've not encountered an organization utilizing it. I can definite see why you would want to install it and manage your home network. It seems pretty simple to set-up and maintain.
ReplyDeleteGuillaume Boudreau - Thanks for the tip on LVM. I didn't know that. That makes me re-think using LVM for my hard drives. I don't want to lose everything if one drive craps out. Having many hard drives that failed, I am all about frequent backups.
ReplyDeleteI had to do a bit of reading to understand how the Amahi worked, but once I knew how to add drives to the pool, and then from there make sure they only had one file redundancy, it was smooth sailing. Try to keep your OS away and isolated in a different drive / mount point. I'd have to admit, the greyhole was a bit confusing at first, but LVM over RAID any day. Ever had to try to restore data from a failed RAID (doesn't matter what 3/5/6/10 RAID - good luck restoring when your controller card goes out, among other issues that arise. Also, RAID is not backup and people forget this)
ReplyDeleteCombined with using Hamachi (secure.logmein.com) which was actually easier to install than I thought, I now can stream my stuff from anywhere that has the Hamachi client installed and configured for the network. Granted, the vpn client for Amahi is okay, but I had issues with various systems I like to log on to and connect. I would also have issues from the network I was using remotely.
Amahi is a great product, but sometimes it's not for everyone. Fedora is running like a champ and nonstop for the past six months. I'd recommend people try Amahi before Ubuntu IMHO, but again, that's why Linux is great - there are so many different choices...
^ A proper RAID card is a far far far less likely point of failure than a HDD. RAID isn't perfect by a long shot and it's poorly understood, but I'm nonetheless not sure how you can recommend LVM over RAID for reliability.
ReplyDeleteThat is correct about the landing point. Look at this page under "Use the Hard Drive for All Shares". http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Adding_a_second_hard_drive_to_your_HDA
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