Amahi Home Server

Amahi is a project that looks like it could be a good home server solution for me. Amahi is a set of packages that installs on Red Hat Linux, and a service that allows cloud configuration of your server.

Many of the features that are available make Amahi a great solution for a home server:

• Firefly media sever for streaming to iTunes


• Built-in VPN server


• File server


• Folder replication with greyhole


• Backup, both full disk (with PBA) and incremental backups (with client software)


• Ability to install other applications.  I am interested in this for:
  
  
  
  • UPnP server, for streaming to Xbox
  
  
  • Squeezebox Server for playing audio to our Squeezeboxes
  
  
  
  

New storage solution

Our Windows Home Server machine has had some problems.  It seems that the drives in the external ESATA enclosure become inaccessible.  After a reboot everything works fine, and when I validate the drives, the results are fine.  I am thinking that the various interfaces are all potential points of failures.  We have 4 drives in the ex475 enclosure, 4 drives in the external ESATA enclosure, 2 drives in an external USB enclosure, and one more USB drive.  Each of those pieces of hardware may fail, and can cause the problems that I am having.

I was thinking about getting a server enclosure, that can support all the drives internally, when the Vail version of Windows Home Server is released.  I would take that as an opportunity to upgrade both the hardware and software, and not attempt to upgrade my existing server, and potentially have the upgrade fail.

But this week, Microsoft announced that the new version of Windows Home Server would not include Drive Extender.  There has been a large community reaction about this, and Microsoft has responded that they are looking into it, but I am not sure what their response would be.

I would install linux on a computer, and use RAID, but there are some downsides to it:

1. Maintenance is not as easy with a consumer server product.  I don't want to manage software upgrades or package dependencies.


2. RAID requires more drive management than I want to do.  With RAID, generally the drives in the pool to be the same size, and to be upgraded together.  Drive Extender allows any size drives to be used, and then added later if necessary.

If Drive Extender is not part of the next version of Windows Home Server, I want to find a different NAS solution.  Maybe a ReadyNAS or a Drobo will work for me.  I just need to find one that has enough storage space for me.

Moved to WordPress.com

In March, I moved my blog from a self-managed WordPress.org installation to a WordPress.org hosting managed by Godaddy.  I haven't been happy with performance of that installation, so I decided to find a different hosting solution.

I decided to move my blogs to WordPress.com.  With this hosting, I wont need to manage any upgrades to the software, but I can let WordPress.com manage the bandwidth and server load.  The transfer to WordPress.com went smoothly, and I paid the $12 to allow a custom domain to be used.

When transitioning from WordPress.org, there are some differences that I met:

• You can't install arbitrary templates or plugins


• If you have multiple blogs associated with your WordPress.com account, you can't have different display names for your posts on each accounts.  (You could probably create multiple WordPress.com accounts.)


• It seems like WordPress.com strips the html that can be used in the text widget.

Interesting Kinect features/behaviors

We got a Kinect a few weeks ago, and have really been enjoying it.  There are some interesting features/behavior of the implementation:

• You can sign into your Xbox Live account with facial recognition, but if you have a PIN on your profile, you will only be logged into your local profile, but not logged in online.


• While some games let use your avatar while playing, and some will use facial recognition to log into your account, I haven't seen any game that will correctly choose a show more than one avatar, when two people are playing.


• You are not able to use voice or hand controls to do everything in the dashboard.  For example:
  
  
  
  • You can't use voice or use your body to control Netflix playback
  
  
  • You can't open the DVD tray with your voice.
  
  
  
  


• You should definitely plan on redoing the KinectID calibration multiple times, to make the facial recognition work well.

PlayOn on Roku

I have mentioned PlayOn before, as the way that we are getting a lot of our television content.  We use PlayOn to view content from Hulu and SyFy channel. Since PlayOn is a UPnP server , we are able to play this content on our Xbox or on our Media Center PC.

It looks like Roku is getting access to PlayOn content.  The addition of the content that Roku already had, the addition of  PlayOn, makes Roku a credible solution for cancelling cable or satellite service.

I am not sure if once you set the Roku up to access PlayOn content, if you need to leave the PC running to access the content.

my6sense

I subscribe to a lot of content feeds.  I have over 700 subscribed feeds in Google Reader, and follow about 500 people in Twitter (I mainly use twitter to find interesting content).  I has gotten hard for me to sift through the content feed to find things that I am interested in.  my6sense is an interesting app/web service to read content.  It's goal it to make content that is relevant for you easier to find.  So far, I am impressed with how well it presents content that I am interested in.

When you first install the application, you either log into your my6sense account.  Then you can associate your Twitter, Google Buzz, and Facebook accounts with the application.  In addition to the social network feeds, you can also your Google Reader subscriptions into the applicaiton.  At that point, you are able to view the content from those various feeds, like any feed reader.

As you start to read & interact with the content, my6sense starts to build up an idea of what interests you.  It looks like the application take several things into account when determining what you are interested in:

• Which articles you read vs which ones you skip over


• Which ones you share with others.  (Since my6sense is a Twitter, Google Buzz, and Facebook client, you can share directly from the application.


• Since the my6sense android application implements the ACTION_SEND intent, for the various social network services, I assume that sharing content though my6sense from other applications will affect my "interests".

Uninstalled SqueezeCenter from Windows Home Server

A while ago Logitech released a version of SqueezeCenter for Windows Home Server.  It was nice to install it on our server, and not have to worry about keeping another computer running, just for access to our music.  I have been having a problem with the installation though.  If the server is restarted, the SqueezeCenter is not able to successfully startup.  It appeared that the SqueezeSQL service wasn't starting fast enough so SqueezeCenter service wasn't able to connect to the database.

Since we are using Window Media Center, we have a faster computer that is always running, that can be used to run the SqueezeCenter software. The music is still on the server, so there is more network traffic when playing local content, but things are working pretty well.