Amahi 8

	WARNING
	This is recommended only for Advanced users, proceed with caution. Amahi 8 IS NOT PRODUCTION ready yet! It's in Alpha release ONLY. We welcome help with testing and request feedback, which should be provideded in bug #1661.

This page is about the Alpha release of Amahi 8 (on Fedora 21).

Prerequisites

• Ensure your system meets the minimum requirements for Amahi before proceeding (NOTE: 64-bits ONLY)

• Download the Fedora 21 Server DVD (full DVD) for 64 bits
  • Fedora 21 Server 64-bit (http)
  • Fedora 21 Server 64-bit (torrent)

• Server Network Install and LIVE Workstation DVD may work, but ONLY full Server DVD with minimal install is officially supported
• 32-bits IS NOT available for Amahi!

Install Fedora

• Install Fedora 21 minimal ... NOT the Desktop:
  • Boot, choose Install Fedora, choose language; then in software selection choose minimal install
  • This is NOT the default and is at the bottom of the list. Don't forget to remove the DVD after installing and before rebooting.
• Choose the hard drive partitioning scheme
• DON'T change the hostname (it may create issues)
• Click on Begin Installation and the installer will proceed
• Create a user with a password. Make sure it's an admin user. Recommend creating a root password.
• After a minimal install one needs to login as root first (in a text console)
• Login with the user and become root for the rest of the installation

 sudo su -

Install Amahi

• Install the Amahi repo by hand with:

  rpm -Uvh http://f21.amahi.org/noarch/hda-release-6.9.0-1.noarch.rpm

• Get the mariadb base packages (this is to avoid dependency conflicts)

  yum -y install mariadb-libs mariadb-server

• Try installing both hda-ctl and hda-platform. This should install a lot of dependencies with them

   yum -y install hda-ctl hda-platform

• If that works, and only if that works, do the Amahi install (also as root; replace YOUR-INSTALL-CODE with the code you set up in Amahi.org):

  hda-install YOUR-INSTALL-CODE

• If that fails, check the Express CD troubleshooting page. For help, please fpaste the log (you may have to yum -y install fpaste). The log should be in

 /root/hda-install-*.log

• If all goes well, it should tell you to reboot

Post Install Notes

• It will boot with the static IP you preconfigured in the Amahi control panel
• You can verify if the dashboard is available by accessing from any client using the IP address.
• It's strongly recommended that you turn off the previous DHCP server and let Amahi handle DHCP so that DNS falls into place
• Reboot all the clients to get them to use your Amahi server
• Your Amahi dashboard should be available at http://hda
• The first time it will initialize and will ask you to login to create a dashboard password for the admin user you created

Upgrading from Amahi 7/F19

We'll need testing on this procedure. The steps to update Amahi from F19 to F21 are:

Upgrade Preparation

• Install Amahi 7 with the express CD
• Do not install any apps
• Update everything in the system: yum -y update
• Reboot to pick up new kernels, etc.
• Update everything in the system again: yum -y update
• If there are any updates, do it again. If there are new kernels, reboot
• Follow with the upgrade below

Actual Upgrade

Install the upgrade tool:

 sudo yum -y install fedup

Do the live update over the network:

 sudo fedup --network 21 --product=server

You may see warnings similar to the following warning but you can ignore them for now. We will clean it up before the upgrade is complete.

WARNING: problems were encountered during transaction test:

broken dependencies

perl-PlRPC-0.2020-13.fc19.noarch requires perl-4:5.16.3-266.fc19.x86_64

ruby-mysql-2.8.2-9.fc19.x86_64 requires ruby-libs-2.0.0.353-16.fc19.x86_64

Continue with the upgrade at your own risk.

If the upgrade does not let you due to issues with (for example) extra packages aded by Amahi-installed apps, you may want to add --nogpgcheck option, i.e.

 sudo fedup --network 21 --product=server --nogpgcheck

While this happens, we recommend you turn on a temporary DHCP server, (e.g. in your router) since the network may go down for the duration of the actual upgrade.

Once the previous fedup command is complete, reboot the server (the command will tell you):

 sudo reboot

The actual upgrade will take place now, so you will not be able to access the server (or the network) until it is complete.

It would be good to have a monitor/keyboard on the system to cover the risk that the upgrade process becomes stuck somehow. This also should let you keep up with progress.

Be aware it may take 15 to 30 minutes at a minimum for the upgrade to complete, depending on your hardware.

Once the upgrade is complete, from the command line execute:

sudo yum check

The following message or similar will be displayed:

perl-PlRPC-0.2020-13.fc19.noarch has missing requires of perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.16.2)

ruby-mysql-2.8.2-9.fc19.x86_64 has missing requires of libruby.so.2.0()(64bit)

Error: check all

To correct these issues, remove the two bad packages (though this could be dangerous if you had a lot of apps installed (in which case we do not recommend it):

sudo yum remove perl-PlRPC-0.2020-13.fc19.noarch ruby-mysql.x86_64

Ensure all the problems are corrected and execute:

sudo yum check

The response should be check all which indicates everything is correct.

Now check the functionality of the Amahi dashboard after you get a DHCP lease from your HDA in your client(s). If the process completed successfully, you are now running Fedora 21 with the latest Amahi platform.

NOTE for TESTERS: If you plan to test this more than once, you may want to download the ISO and do this locally, to avoid large downloads over the network each time the update is done.

Ref: FedUp Wiki

Install Media Testing

1. Server Full DVD Headless (2.1GB download)
   • Installed Amahi 8 without issues
2. Workstation Live DVD Desktop (1.5GB)
   • Not configurable for minimal install
   • Install and start OpenSSH server
     • yum -y install openssh-server
     • systemctl enable sshd.service
     • systemctl start sshd.service
   • SSH into OS to complete install steps
   • Installed Amahi 8 without issues
3. Server Netinstall CD Headless (440MB)
   • May take longer to install depending on internet connection speed as packages are downloaded from Fedora repositories
   • Installed Amahi 8 without issues

NOTE: USB install using the above methods has not been tested.

Hopeful features

• New disk wizard
• Per app database backup/restore
• Extra parameters for Samba [Global] area (Bug 1341)
• Pre defined extra parameters for Shares

Apps Availability

• There are over 200 Amahi applications currently LIVE or in BETA status.
• Popular apps LIVE:
  • Greyhole and Greyhole UI
  • Amahi sync
  • OpenVPN
  • DLNA
  • ownCloud 8
  • Amahi Anywhere
• Popular apps in BETA:
  • IPsec VPN

How to Help

There are several ways to help:

• If you are a contributor, make sure you get a machine running with Amahi 8 and get your apps to run on it
• If you want to test the install, get a VM and an ISO file of the base OS and let's test! This is probably the best way to help without deep technical knowledge.
• If you want to help with the platform, get in the Amahi Mailing list and get some patches going. Ruby and RoR can help here.
• Testing and porting themes will also help
• Want to develop a new theme? Check the How to Create a new Theme page
• Stop by and hang out on our IRC Channel #Amahi on irc.freenode.net