Transition to Amahi

Probably one of the most difficult part 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 some site 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

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

3. turn off the network (WiFi) and turn it back on after a few seconds on your clients, so they get a DHCP lease from your HDA and hence DNS

4. sometimes the clients also cache DNS in their browsers, you can hard-refresh the browser, or simply reboot

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.

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.