Transition to Amahi

Probably one of the most difficult parts of transitioning to using your Amahi HDA with the recommended setup is to get all systems to use your HDA for DNS.

A typical symptom is that either accessing the dashboard as

http://hda

or apps that have a web interface (or both) are not reachable and leads to a site outside your network, on the internet (like amahi.net)

For best results, we recommend that you fully transition your network to using your Amahi server at least for DNS.

NOTE: .

	WARNING
	Turning off the DHCP in your router is the last step you take after installing Amahi. It should ONLY be done if your HDA is FULLY WORKING, otherwise you may be locked out without Internet in your own network.

The easiest and simplest way to do this is to do these things in the following order:

1. turn off any other DHCP server in your network (typically in your router/gateway) and let Amahi handle DHCP so that DNS falls into place automatically.

2. renew Client IP Address or reboot all your client devices. You can do this by turning off the network and turn it back on after a few seconds on your clients (or unplugging it or turning off WiFi for a few seconds, then), so they get a DHCP lease from your HDA, which includes DNS.

3. sometimes the clients machine also cache DNS in browsers. To avoid this, you can hard-refresh the browser, or simply reboot the machine.

If you have any fixed IP devices in your network from your router settings, these may not pick up a DHCP lease. You may set them up in your HDA under Setup > Networking > Fixed IPs.

An Alternative

Alternatively, if you cannot or do not want to turn off your router DHCP, you can still use the DNS server in your HDA. Here are the tradeoffs of not using the fully recommended configuration

To do this, since the the DNS settings for the DHCP server in your router and fill them (both primary server and secondary) to be the IP of your HDA.

You should set them both to the IP of the HDA, so that the HDA is your DNS server for all your devices. You will need to still renew Client IP Address or reboot all your client devices to pick these new settings up.

This way, your clients will still use your router for DHCP, but DNS from your Amahi HDA, hence accessing the apps via the short URLs will work.

The last step is to turn off the DHCP server in your HDA under Setup > Networking > Settings. For this menu to show, you have to enable Advanced Settings under Setup > Settings.

If you have further networking trouble, consult the Network Troubleshooting page.