Google Summer of Code Ideas

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If you are you a GSOC student or and have questions about Amahi, you can contact us via IRC on #amahi on irc.freenode.net (fairly active) or on the amahi-devel mailing list (not as active).

If you are a student, come talk to us about the ideas below for possible projects! Don't forget that these are subject to suggestions, extensions or adaptations. Feel free to discuss or propose new ideas for projects!

One of the most important things is to find an area that you enjoy, using a programming language that you know or that you are willing to learn, so read below or ask questions.

If you are interested in being a mentor, we have six great mentors as of today, but we're very welcoming of more ideas and more mentors! See the mentors below. Looking for ideas to mentor, see the other ideas below.

About Amahi

We're looking for students with skills in these areas: current technologies like RoR, ruby, python, PHP, as well as next generation technologies, like Go (we use it for streaming to our mobile apps), Node.js, SPDY, javascript frameworks for user interaction, visualization or server services, etc.

Amahi started of a need to keep a personal/home cloud server, keep all my family's photos, videos, documents, and generally any data. It expanded into running applications, mostly web apps, from anything to doing backups to automatic downloaders, media managers and much more.

Amahi is made up of

  • A Linux distribution, currently Fedora, but we support Ubuntu as well
  • An installer to help the user bring bring Amahi up in their system
  • A platform, which is a web app that the user uses to manage their server, add apps
  • Apps that are installed by using the platform


At Amahi we use git (see our Github repo) for our version management and the technologies we have ended up using are Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Linux system internal technologies like system services, configuration areas, web server virtualhosts, databases, DNS, etc., etc.

Submitting Proposals

You can introduce yourself via an initial introduction form where you can tell us about yourself, propose your project ideas as well as new ideas.

Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project on the ideas above that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest a new idea!

We expect your application to be in the range of 1000 words. Below that, it may not be enough information for us to determine whether you are the right person for the job. Your proposal should contain at least the following information, but feel free to include anything that you think is relevant:

  • Include your name and irc/github handle
  • Title of your proposal
  • Abstract of your proposal
  • A link to your github profile or similar
  • Detailed description of your idea including explanation on why is it innovative
  • Description of previous work, existing solutions (links to prototypes, bibliography are more than welcome)
  • Mention the details of your academic studies, any previous work, internships
  • Any relevant skills that will help you to achieve the goal (programming languages, frameworks)?
  • Any previous open-source projects (or even previous GSoC) you have contributed to?
  • Do you plan to have any other commitments during SoC that may affect you work? Any vacations/holidays planned?
  • Contact details


Official proposals will be submitted via the the GSoC page.

Best of luck!

List of Project Ideas

We have organized the ideas in groups, depending what area of Amahi they belong in. These groups are not in any particular order. For instance if you are a front-end person who knows HTML and Javascript, the GUI/UX may well be the best fit and we'd love to hear from you!

Platform

Plugin System

Description: Make the ability to create and install Amahi Plugins easy and enable the creation of those plugins for a variety of purposes, like SMART monitoring, system stuff (network scanning, etc.) and the two examples below for the disk wizard and the Greyhole UI, among other ideas.

Objective: Create an amahi plugin system, where PHP, Python, Node, and other modern webapps can be easily integrated. We can currently do this with some RoR engines, but the mechanism is not robust enough. The plugins system should allow modern web-based apps to be easily integrated with Amahi -- from Node.js apps to Ruby/PHP/Python -- so that users can easily reap the benefits of the onslaught of difficult-to-deploy modern web apps with a single click install. ProTip: possibly leverage docker containers within Amahi

Skills Required: RoR, git

Mentors: Carlos, Rod

Disk Wizard

Description: Expanding the storage capacity is an important feature of Amahi but as of now it requires advanced (e.g. command line) skills. We want easy disk/partition onboarding. Also add the ability to be asked to mount USB drives as a share when they're connected & connect external shares from for example a NAS with the plugin system using that wizard.

Objective: Create an amahi plugin that will streamline this process by providing a UI for disk management. The plugin should detect if a new disk was added and it should provide a wizard to create partitions and format with the desired file system

Skills Required: Low level system scripting

Mentors: Dag, Bogdan

References:

Greyhole UI

Description: Greyhole is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives (whatever their size, however they're connected), and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails. The purpose of this plugin is to provide a UI and the necessary tools under the UI to make starting and managing a Greyhole UI possible and nice to understand for regular humans.

Objective: Create and amahi plugin that provides an UI that allows for the management of the greyhole pool. The plugin should allow an administrator user to: add/remove disks to/from the pool.

  • change the number of copies for individual file/directory
  • invoke various gh commands
  • view and monitor log files
  • gui to visualize data distribution


Skills Required: RoR, System programming

Mentors: Carlos, Rod

Amahi 8

Description: Amahi 7.2 and Amahi 8 are what's next. This is the time to come up with exciting features and ideas that we should put in Amahi 8 and the GSOC timeline is a perfect match!

Objective: Work closely with the core team to define the features and functionality that we need to implement to get Amahi 8 released. This project is about working on RoR and the Amahi platform core. Some of the core technology will need to be upgraded, like Rails 4, latest Phusion Passenger, possibly replace MySQL for the platform and use sqlite, create a native API to the platform that can be used by other apps, like mobile apps. Other ideas include beefing up security and provide support for Amahi hosting on the cloud.

Skills Required: RoR, ruby, JS, CSS, HTML5

Mentors: Carlos, Rod

Backup App Data and Settings

Description: When new versions of Amahi come out, a drawback of Amahi is that it's hard to backup the settings (e.g. partitioning) installed applications and their user data

Objective: The plugin should allow an administrator to backup any application data either on an external media or in the cloud(e.g.: Dropbox, Google Drive, etc).The restore process should check if the application is installed on the HDA and if not it should be automatically installed from the AppStore before the user data is restored.

  • Create an Amahi plugin that will allow backup and restore of the user data for apps installed from the AppStore
  • Centralizing app data/configs - link them to app folder instead.
  • "Destructive" update awareness
  • Ability to list, outline data directories for backups/upgrade check


Skills Required: System scripting

Mentor: Rod, Daniel

Mobile

Mobile is a great topic at the moment and there are a lot of opportunities here. In the Android app, definitely more than one student are suitable for the project.

Android App Implementation

Description: There's huge demand for an Android application following the popularity of our iOS app. Our users are looking for an application that has feature parity with the existing iOS app, and even shows it up with additional features!

Objective: An Android app that is on par or better than the iOS app, including mobile streaming, downloading files and sharing them.

Skills Required: Java, Android, REST, JSON API programming, media interaction in Android

Mentor: Jesse Read, Carlos, Bogdan

Webapp Browsing in Mobile apps

Description: Add browsing of installed webapps within our mobile app.

Objective: One requested feature for our mobile app (iOS and later Android) is the ability to browse apps within our mobile app. Our server side of the app needs to be setup to proxy specific webapps that the user has installed. Collaboration with the iOS/Android devs will also be necessary to prototype it. Technically, this project consists of add functionality to our reference proxy (written in Go) to do transparent HTTP proxying for individual webapps separately. It's not a mobile project in the sense of being on a mobile OS.

Skills Required: Go programming

Things to be implemented:

  • NPN negotiation
  • More edge case tests.
  • Server push
  • Compliance to http/2
  • Actual implementation of priorities (everything is one priority at the moment)
  • Extensive error handling for all possible rainy-day scenarios specified in the specification
  • Support for other than HTTP GET frames, i.e. POST, PUT or any request that has a body

More can be found on Amahi Github repo.

Mentors: Carlos, Bogdan

Reference: Amahi Github repo, in particular the SPDY and SPDY-proxy repos written in Golang

Reliability

CI Server for Apps

Description: App reliability is critical for Amahi. We have been striving to develop a customized CI (Continuous Integration) server for testing apps.

Objective: Develop up a CI server for apps (we have been calling a prototype "the app grinder") . The goal is to achieve 100% app installation and reliability. An important goal is to support a tester program for Amahi. We have a number of ideas of what we want to achieve -- how to design the CI server so that testers can easily see their passes, failures and anything in between.

Skills Required: Capybara, ruby, Webkit, Selenium, maybe Vagrant and system scripting. Other possible technologies could be Jenkins, Travis, etc.

Mentors: Carlos, Bogdan

App Sandboxing

Description: Use containers to improve app stability

Objective: Some apps may be more suitably installed inside a container because they may be too disruptive in a system. Can we you use popular sandboxing environments to contain apps that want to take over things, like Zimbra, or some PBX/VoIP systems, etc.

Skills Required: Docker, Vagrant (for testing), ruby, bash, Mbox

Mentor:: Carlos, Bogdan

Apps

Innovative app or app packaging and app-related projects.

Improved VPN Security

Description: Improve the security of our OpenVPN and IPSec VPN apps. Examples are allowing users to generate their own certificates, identify weak spots and strengthen them.

Objective: For the example of generating their own certificates, build a wizard to allow users to create and manage their certificates. Another goal would be to provide logging of VPN connections, so that the user can see the activity on their VPN.

Skills Required: keen sense of security settings, certificates

Mentors: Daniel, Carlos


Caching Server

Description: a caching proxy to save on bandwidth

Objective: Develop and plugin that will allow an administrator user to control the traffic for specific devices inside the network. This app (or possibly a plugin) should display all the connected device as well as provide the ability to search by name/MAC address. For a selected device the administrator should:

  • Limit access between certain time intervals
  • Limit bandwidth
  • Block certain websites (either on an individual basis or read them from a file)
  • Limit traffic

Skills Required: system configuration and scripting

Mentors: Daniel, Jesse


Network Groups

Description: Develop a plugin to allow network device grouping. This will be the framework for future plugins.

Objective: Allow an administrator to group network devices in groups with different permissions. Limit the user access to certain apps based on the group settings.

Skills Required: RoR, system programming

Mentors: Jesse, Daniel

Create UI and package it for RSnapshot

Description: Make a UI for rsnapshot

Objective: RSnapshot is a great application to backup local data, making efficient use of storage as well as CPU resources and can handle a lot of data. A one-click app that includes a UI to set up and manage RSnapshot backups. Also, possibly backup to GDrive, S3, other cloud solutions

Skills Required: RoR, system programming

Mentor: Rod, Dag

References

Package VoIP and/or PBX system

Description: A frequently requested application that is hard to package and configure is a voice over IP telephony app. Related to this is also a PBX system

Objective: configuring PBX or a VoIP system can be complex. There are several hurdles to this. The task is to evaluate all

Skills Required: app scripting and packaging, telephony, VoIP, messaging systems

Mentors: Carlos, Pat

References:

Installer

Improved Installation

Description: Improved installation experience for users.

Objective: Configuration and installation of Amahi can be painful for some percentage of users. Many of them do not know much or care for Linux. We want to make the installation as smooth as possible not just for them, but for more even more regular (non-techy) users. Ubuntu has some challenges of its own to make it work without dropping the users to the command line.

  • Create a new Anaconda node for Amahi configuration
  • Similarly for Ubuntu
  • Make images that enable booting from USB devices "out of the box"
  • Detect sub-optimal configurations of disk partitions and provide feedback to the user
  • Measure and analyze how users get tripped on installation and create ways to tackle these issues, bringing installation issues down

Skills Required: Python, Linux boot process internals, creating ISO images

Mentors: Carlos, Daniel, Jesse

User Onboarding

Description: Help users get their HDA up and running with minimal interaction after installation

Objective: Happier users. The idea is to implement an automated configuration check tool. The current Amahi Interactive Troubleshooter can be used as a starting point. The tool should:

  • check if the installation was successful
  • compare current settings against the expected settings
  • automatically fix inconsistencies with no user interaction

Skills Required: RoR, scripting, netflow capture, dhcping scripting

Mentors: Daniel, Carlos

Ubuntu 14.04

Description: Get Amahi ready for Ubuntu 14.04

Objective: Further development on the Amahi platform to be able to install the same applications and have the same features as the Fedora based version. A new install CD package that allows you to add Amahi functionality to Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS)

Skills Required: ruby, ISO creation

Mentor: Carlos, Frans

Networking

Clustering Amahi Servers

Description: Create a system to create data nodes that integrate with the Amahi API as well as auto mount as NFS or SMB shares to allow the usage of applications through locally mounted shares (such as gallery, subsonic etc). This would allow you to connect Windows / Linux computers as data nodes. Perhaps an installable agent?

Objective: An installer that integrates with Amahi (a stripped down version of Amahi?) and a management pane in the main amahi server that allows you to add a server by IP or DNS name.

Skills Required: Ruby, misc system scripting

Mentors: Carlos, Dan, Rod

Rolling Distribution

Description: Make Amahi a rolling distribution

Objective: Being able to upgrade Amahi versions without having to upgrade OSs is very appealing and a huge win.

Skills Required: major Linux packaging mojo, ruby, system scripting, ISO packaging, repo creation

Mentor: Carlos, Jesse Read

GUI and UX

This area can offer a lot of possibilities for ideas. A lot can be improved in Amahi to make the users happier. We are listing one topic here, but there are many, from a better front-end HTML (responsiveness, html5 compliance, browser compatibility, etc.), to CSS re-implementation, to allow for nice JS libraries to be used in plugins easily, like D3.js, Highcharts, etc., etc.

Better Theme Integration

Description: Our theme system is pretty good, however, it's very customized and we could do better with a more responsive front-end

Objective:

  • allow the usage of popular themes out there, like themes for Drupal, Wordpress, etc., with minor configuration changes, or even directly
  • allow the integration of mobile themes
  • provide hooks to detect mobile devices and present a mobile theme


Skills Required: CSS, HTML5, ruby, RoR

Mentors: Jesse, Carlos

Innovative Documentation

Description: Document Amahi in innovative ways, like screencasts, extra videos, hands-on guides, etc.

Objective:

  • Improve the way users get value from Amahi by instructing how to do typical operations
  • It could be with screencasts, hand-on guides, videos, etc.

Skills Required: management of teams, organization and documentation

Mentors: Carlos

Other Ideas

  • Add features to our popular Amahi app for iOS: Offer to display image-heavy folders and shares within a "gallery" or collection view, add the ability to navigate and stream shares containing music in a streamlined way, Dynamic search, SPDY support, for both remote and local queries, support for accessing HDA web applications within Amahi for iOS, share folders and files from your HDA to other apps or users, support for HDA user permissions (share & web app restrictions, etc.). Mentors available: Jesse and Carlos
  • PHP API: make a native PHP SDK for the Amahi platform, so that PHP apps (we have a lot of them) can more easy be integrated
  • Integrate a mail server as an app. Identify any settings or configuration that need to be implemented in the platform
  • Router integration, UPNP, direct control
  • Port AES (Amahi Energy Server) to Amahi 7
  • Integration of LDAP as a back-end management system, calendaring
  • Feature development (examples):
  • Calendaring, and integrated contact manager application. Possible options: 1) ownCloud based or 2) Apache carddav
  • For the more design-oriented, build mobile theme(s)
  • Documentation or screencasts/tutorials


Plus, of course we are open to suggestions. Open a dialog. We're happy to discuss and determine a suitable project.

Amahi is a platform that will support the deployment of other open source applications. If you are interested in the integration of applications in your area of interest, just contact us with suggestions.

Mentors

This is a list of committed mentors. If you are interested in mentoring, let us know via IRC (mention the nicks below):

  • Carlos Puchol (cpg, PST, GSOC admin): team lead for Amahi, experience in RoR, Go, Ruby, RoR, system scripting/development, app packaging, C, C++
  • Bogdan Mitrea (megabitdragon, CST, GSOC admin): Android, Java, app packaging, system programming,C , C++, community lead
  • Rod Runyon (bigfoot65, CST): app lead for Amahi, system programming, app packaging, reliability, documentation, support
  • Jesse Read (DarthNerdus, EST): mobile team lead, system development, Objective C, iOS, Java, Android, C, C++, and much more
  • Daniel Falk (dnfalk, CST): system development and management, virtualization, networking, infrastructure
  • Dag Notland (dano5, CET): app packaging, system programming, community lead


Reference: GSOC mentoring page.

Reference

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