After VAIL-fail I decided to try Amahi

I installed WHS Vail on my Scaleo a few months ago. This is because I got a system crash, due to power outage, of my WHS V1 and factory restore did not work and a reinstallation from scratch was still to be expected with this. However, it took only a few days before Microsoft released another update, but with this came the news that they abandoned Drive Extender (DE). DE is the pooling technology that has made it so easy to add disks to WHS and a selling point for many.

There has been a lot of debate about this and performance issues, together with a consolidation between Small Business Server and the WHS teams, have been pointed out as a reason why MS wanted to leave DE. Recently, some functionality has been added again regarding files being loaded on more than one disk, etc., but nothing that is as simple as DE when it comes to adding new disks, etc. If you want to follow some of the discussions and reactions on the subject, these are available

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windowshomeserver/

For me, this meant that I was facing another reinstallation. But then I decided to do something I had been thinking about for a long time. I installed Ubuntu Server on it and installed everything I needed to get the functionality I wanted. I sketched a bit on my own DE functionality for Linux, but with this I heard about Greyhole. It worked in exactly what my original idea looked like so I decided to give it a try. Then I read that Greholey was installed as standard with Amahi, “but what is Amahi” I thought then.

Amahi turned out to be a basically complete Home Server based on Fedora 10. Now it is called Amahi6 and is updated and runs on Fedora 14. With Greyhole you get basically what you had with DE and although some things still have to be configured via terminal, most things are done from a web interface. There is an “AppStore” where ready-made packages of tested programs are available for 1-click installations. For example, it can be about installing Media-Wiki, uTorrent, Transmission, SpeedTest Mini, DLNA, WordPress, SABnzbd, CouchPotato, Sick Beard, Squeezebox Server, MythTV Backend, CrashPlan, etc., etc., etc.

New “Apps” are coming all the time and the crowd that uses Amahi has recently grown a lot with people who have just left WHS. I can not say that Amahi is right for everyone, but I will probably not go back to WHS for a very long time. I have basically all the functionality I used in WHS, plus VPN by default, plus the stability of both file system and operation that Linux offers.

If you, like me, are a little tired of MS’s management of WHS, I recommend you read about Amahi at the link below. Questions about my experiences with Amahi at our dear Scaleo’s I am happy to answer

https://www.amahi.org