Amahi Home Server – The Free Alternative to Windows Home Server?
Over the past week my Windows Home Server box has been crashing, restarting and causing me and my family many problems. It’s not been the first time this has happened. A couple of times now I have managed to rescue data from it before re-installing Windows Home Server on the same machine and starting again.
I decided to ask people on Twitter if they knew of an alternative to Windows Home Server. I chat to quite a few Linux geeks on Twitter and they’re always trying to get me off my Windows machines. I’m not a fan boy but I do use Microsoft operating systems normally because I can run all kinds of software and games that I wouldn’t be able to with Linux. This wasn’t really a concern for a server. All I wanted were back-ups and some shared folders that could be accessed across my home network.
A great guy on Twitter named Simon Doyle (@sidolye) suggested that I should take a look at Amahi so I did. I was very impressed with what I saw looking around the website and was sold on installing it after reading some of the testimonials.
First of all I needed to download myself a Fedora 10 Installation DVD (Fedora 11 isn’t supported with Amahi yet) which I got from here. Don’t do what I did in my haste and excitement though – I stupidly downloaded the PPC version which is of course for Power PC Mac’s – that’s not going to work on a home built PC with an AMD64 processor. You need the i386 version. 
I’m not sure if the x64 version is supported for Amahi but I guess not. EDIT: The x64 version is also supported so you could also use that if you have a 64bit CPU.
Installation of Fedora 10 was a breeze. I have installed various Linux distributions in the past but I’m no expert. I don’t think anyone would have a problem with it as long as they read the on-screen instructions.
Unfortunately I didn’t read the instructions for the installation of Fedora on the Amahi installation page! I should have added a software repository for Amahi during the installation. I mistaken thought that it wouldn’t matter and that I’d be able to add the software repository address after Fedora was up and running – you can’t! You can read these instructions which I didn’t and caused me to have to reinstall Fedora from here. You’ll kick yourself if you don’t read them!
If you install Fedora with the Amahi repository correctly by following the instructions, installation is so easy! It’s just as easy as installing Windows Home Server (which is just like installing Windows XP). I guess that it took around 30 minutes.
I won’t go into every step of the installation process, just make sure you read the instructions over at the Amahi site and you’ll have no problem whatsoever.
If you’re interested in the spec of the machine I’m now running Fedora 10 and Amahi on here you go.
|
AMD64 3700+ (2.4Ghz) |
Socket 754 Motherboard |
|
2GB DDR400 |
500GB HDD |
Once everything was installed and up and running per the instructions I turned off DHCP on my router (read the instructions before doing this), set-up a few static IP addresses for the 3 PC’s at home and everything worked well. Amahi uses OpenDNS which is a good choice for DNS IMHO but I think this is something that can be changed if you’d like.
One of the main reasons for me having a server at home is for back-ups. These are easily set-up through Windows 7 which is the OS I’m using on all 3 PC’s at home at the moment. It’s just a case of visiting the Control Panel, going to the Back-up and Restore page, selecting the network location and running through a wizard. This isn’t as nice as the back-up system in Windows Home Server but it’s simple and does the job just as well. I have created a back-ups folder of the server for each machine. For example: \\hda\luke\backup and \\hda\mandy\backup etc.
The other reason I have a server at home is so that media files can be accessed from any PC that happens to be on and files aren’t duplicated across machines. I have all of my music in a shared folder on the server so someone in the living room can be listening to something, I can jump on my PC and also have access to the same music folders. The same could be done with photos, videos or any other files that need to be accessed from multiple machines. The only issue I have found with Amahi is that because it is running on Fedora and not a Windows machine, the files and folders aren’t indexed in a way that Windows 7 understands. This means that folders on the server can’t be included in “Libraries”. Continue reading »
Removing Linux Grub & Restoring Windows 7 Boot GUI
Recently I had been playing with Kubuntu on my Windows 7 machine. Don’t get me wrong, Kubuntu and other Linux distributions are great. I wanted to remove it because I wasn’t really using it anymore and I was getting sick of booting my machine and forgetting to change the GRUB option at start-up to boot into Windows 7.
I know that the GRUB can be edited so that Windows 7 would boot first but I no-longer had the need for Kubuntu so I wanted to remove it all together including the GRUB.
First of all I made a really dumb n00b error of booting into Windows 7 and deleting the partitions that Kubuntu occupied. Of course, the GRUB remained and my computer wouldn’t even start. To get back to being able to boot again, I inserted my Kubuntu DVD and re-installed so the GRUB would work again.
Now I thought, maybe EasyBCD would be able to remove the GRUB from within Windows 7 and then I could delete the Kubuntu partitions again. Unfortunately EasyBCD could not do this.
My next plan was to boot from my Windows 7 DVD and use the option to fix start-up errors. This was not a good plan either. The GRUB remained but I now had a Windows Vista GUI start-up instead of the much more pretty Windows 7 one.
I decided to do some research before making anymore stupid mistakes – RTFM comes to mind.
So I discovered that the first step to remove the GRUB (and Kubuntu or other disto of Linux) is to boot from your Windows 7 DVD, select your language and then to choose the repair option.
At the repair option you should choose the command prompt and use the command: bootsect /nt60 C:
Now restart your computer and Windows 7 should boot without entering the GRUB because this has been removed from your machine.
If you have somehow got the old Windows Vista start-up GUI displaying on start-up, then you should wait for your computer to boot into Windows 7 and run the command prompt as an Administrator. To get the Windows 7 GUI start-up back, use the following command: bootrec /fixmbr
Once you’re happy that your computer is booting without the GRUB and directly into Windows 7 you can remove all traces of the Linux distribution going into Disk Management (Windows Key + R and type diskmgmt.msc). Simply delete the partitions and then expand the rest of the drive containing data to fill the empty space.
The above is just a brief overview of what I did but if you have any questions or would like anything in more detail, please contact me or leave a comment.
Recommended UK Broadband
Hosted By
Recent Posts
Designed by UmeeDesign
Categories
Photography Services
