Amahi for Ubuntu: The Ultimate Home Server?

What is Amahi?

Amahi, according to the official server website at amahi.org, is the software that powers the PC that acts as a central computer for your home network.

Amahi handles the storage, entertainment, and computing aspects of your home network. You can watch your downloaded TV shows on your laptop, listen to music files on an Android tablet, and work on documents on another PC without having to copy these files to your separate devices. It remains in the central PC.

Developers like to present Amahi as a home digital assistant that offers all the functionality of a home server while being very easy to use.

Amahi for Ubuntu: features and benefits

Amahi is easy to install and maintain, and ultimately makes your home network simple, too.

With Amahi, you can easily:

• Protect all your devices by allowing you to have a backup of all your connected computers. This means you can easily restore your machines when the need arises.

• Set up your own VPN. Having your own VPN allows you to securely access your home network from anywhere.

• Organize files on any computer. With Amahi, you can find, access, and share files on almost any PC you have on your network.

• Extend capabilities with applications. With Amahi, it’s about something built on open source standards: Linux. But even if you don’t have any experience working with Linux, you’ll be able to download, install, and use web applications that could help you enjoy your PCs more.

Amahai now has a list of web applications that you can easily use with your system. You can see the list at amahi.org.

So whether you need to install Wiki software to help you manage your affairs at home, or have an easy-to-use backup solution, or an alternative to iTunes, or have time to play some games, there’s an Amahi app for you. that. !

While Amahi has been around for a while, it was only in 2012 that it released a version for Ubuntu. Amahi’s Ubuntu uses Greyhole 0.9, which was the latest storage pool technology at the time of its release, while it was made to be more reliable and featured a more polished look. Amahi for Ubuntu included support for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines and had additional cloud storage via Amahi Synch.

What others say:

Amahi has been collecting many rave reviews from experts.

Luke Addison switched from Windows Home Server to Amahi and stated that Amahi seemed to perform much better than WHS and used fewer resources.

Addison noted that everything was so easy from installation to setup. Not to mention that with Amahi, he doesn’t have to worry about viruses and having to recover data, reformat and reinstall everything just because the OS has been messing everything up in just several months of operations.

MaximumPC had an article comparing different free server setups and notes that Amahi is easy to use, simple and free. Plus, you’ll benefit from the rich Amahi community, where you can get support and even plugins without having to learn a single command line.

However, to give you an idea of ​​how good Amahi is for Ubuntu as a home server, it would be instructive to compare it to Windows Home Server, which many would be more familiar with.

Amahi vs. windows home server

Traditionally, Windows has been releasing networking software aimed at businesses. But with the growing use of networks in the home and the need to connect devices like PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, smart TVs and the like, Microsoft realized it needed something more fine-tuned for the home.

Microsoft addressed this by creating Windows Home Server. But when Server 2012 was released with four different flavors, Microsoft also announced that it would be discontinuing Windows Home Server.

WHS is actually a very nice piece of software that allows your devices to talk to each other. Very easy to use, too.

But having been discontinued, people would have to find an alternative for it.

When it comes to functionality and features, there is not much difference between WHS and Amahi. But Amahi might not be so intuitive. With Amahi, you will need to perform smaller tasks before you can complete a larger task, unlike WHS which uses simple GUIs. Fortunately, Ubuntu has a large support community that you can check with.

Here is a comparison of the features:

• Storage Pool. This is where all of your hard drives act as a single storage medium, making it easy to add or remove hard drives. Amahi has this feature, while WHS removed its Drive Extender feature in later versions.

• Automated backups. While Amahi offers several backup solutions and can automatically back up all of your devices, WHS has good automated backup systems that Amahi can’t beat.

• File sharing. Both Amahi and WHS are very compliant with regulated file sharing.

• Media streaming. WHS can instantly stream any movie, video or music file to any DLNA device. However, with Amahi, you’ll need to install an app to handle streaming media.

• Security. Because Amahi is based on Linux, it is much more secure and reliable than any Windows server. Linux is known for more secure servers that crash less frequently than Windows servers.

• App Center. WHS does not have its own official application center.

Amahi for Ubuntu comes from a long list of notable releases that garnered many positive reviews from IT professionals. Simply put, Amahi is easy to install and use. It may not be as polished as Windows Home Server, but it gets the job done pretty well. But what brings it to the top is its applications and the support you get from the community, so you have no problem expanding its functionalities even if you are not familiar with Linux or Ubuntu.