Google Summer of Code Ideas

Are you a GSOC student or mentor? Have questions? Contact us via IRC on #amahi on irc.freenode.net or on the amahi-devel mailing list.

If you are interested in being a mentor, we have a 6 great mentors as of today, but we're very welcoming of mode ideas and more mentors!

If you are a student, come talk to us about these ideas below for possible projects! Don't forget that these are subject to suggestions, extensions or adaptations. Even new ideas will be considered. Some of these ideas are more mature and concrete than others.

The most important thing is to find an area that you enjoy, using a programming language that you know or are willing to learn!

List of Project Ideas

Plugin System

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.

Expected result

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

Mentor

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

Expected result

The plugins 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

Mentor

• Dag, Bogdan

References

• OpenMediaVault

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.

Objective

Create and amahi plugin that provides an UI that allows for the management of the greyhole pool.

Expected result

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 programing

Mentor

User Onboarding

Description

Improved workflow for users to come up with their HDA running

Objective Happier users

Expected result Have an automated unit test. It should test the current network settings against the expected settings. In case of inconsistencies it should offer the user solutions with very little interaction.

Skills Required

• RoR, scripting, netflow capture, dhcping scripting

Mentor

• Daniel, Carlos

Backup app data/settings

Description

An important drawback of Amahi is the inability to backup the installed applications and their user data

Objective

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

Expected result

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.

Skills Required

• System scripting

Mentor

• Rod

Caching Server

Description

Objective

Develop and plugin that will allow an administrator user to control the traffic for specific devices inside the network

Expected result

The 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

• Squid

Mentor

• Carlos, Daniel, Jesse

Network Groups

Description

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

Expected result 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

Mentor

• Jesse, Daniel

Mobile App Awesomization (iOS)

Description

Objective

Take the iOS app to a whole new level of usability and popularity by adding really useful features, like

• algorithmically detect image-heavy folders on the fly and offer to display them as a gallery view
• similarly with on-the-fly music folders
• dynamic search
• SPDY support for all remote accesses (+1 for local)
• support for webapp browsing
• folder sharing
• local user support
• adding support for GDrive, Dropbox
• Mobile user onboarding, and HDA setup assistance

Expected result

The mobile app will become really polished and fast, as well as a pleasure to use.

Skills Required

Objective-C/Cocoa

Mentor

Jesse, Carlos

Mobile App Implementation (Android)

Description

Objective

We have great demand for an Android app thanks to the popularity of our iOS app. Our users want us to make an Amahi Android app to support login, browsing and streaming of Amahi servers.

Expected result

An Android app that can be on par or better than the iOS app, with mobile streaming, downloading files and sharing them.

Skills Required

Java, Android Stack

Mentor

Jesse, Carlos, Bogdan

Create UI and package it for RSnapshot

Description

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.

Expected result

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

Reference

• rsnapshot-backup-php
• Webrsnapshot

Clustering Amahi servers

Description

Objective

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?

Expected result

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

Mentor

Make Amahi a rolling distribution

Description

Objective

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

Expected result

Make Amahi into a rolling distribution.

Skills Required

Mentor

Use Containers

Description

Objective

Use containers like Docker for better app installs an interactions

Expected result

Better app packaging.

Skills Required

Mentor

App Testing

Description

Objective

Bring up the grinder up to speed

Expected result

App reliability goes to 100%.

Skills Required

Mentor

Ubuntu 14.04

Description

Objective

Further development on the amahi platform to be able to install the same applications and have the same features as the ubuntu based version.

Expected result

A new install CD or ruby package that allows you to add amahi functionality to Ubuntu 12.04 or Ubuntu 14.04 (if it is released and LTS)

Skills Required

Mentor

Hard

• Add support for UPnP control of home routers from within the setup pages, e.g. to easily and dynamically control settings like DHCP server enable/disable, port forwarding, etc.
• Add support for Ubuntu or, in general, debian-based distributions
• Add support for an Android based distribution
• Enhance REST API to support management from other interfaces (eg. Android, iPhone)
• Build Android or iPhone interface to control home server
• Integrate one of the more complex applications, such as
  • MythTV back-end
  • FUPPES UPnP server (or other UPnP/DLNA server, eg. uShare, mediatomb)
  • firewall (Shorewall, moonwall, ...)
  • Asterisk
  • OpenPBX
• Integration of LDAP as a back-end management system
• Feature development (examples):
  • Easily change domain/DHCP settings managed by Amahi
  • Use external and internal domain (internet/intranet)
  • Change share servers to use a plugin system to allow each share to select which server they use
  • Browseable selection of files and paths in dashboard
  • Ability to add/mount disks via browser interface
  • Seamlessly add drives as an option for share points

Medium

• Integrate a mail server
• Enhance the theme engine to handle mainstream templates directly or with minimal configuration (e.g. Drupal, Wordpress, or others)
• Replace BIND as DNS server by a more dynamic, reconfigurable DNS server
• Build an integrated contact manager application

Easy

• Improve the theme engine to handle more sophisticated themes
• For the more design-oriented, build new and exciting themes

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

For other ideas, review our page on how to Contribute. Then explore our suggestions forum and our new bug tracker (features suggested).

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.

Reference

• GSOC 2014
• Drupal
• MySQL
• KDE Ideas