Easy to set access control rights, configure automatic backup, has browser based music serving plug-in as a bonus. The “Slideshow” app is simply amazing for showing off photos to friends.

Plus it ships with a zero-configuration VPN for accessing your files from outside the home. I haven’t tried that part yet.

This really nice application. Install it, reboot, and Windows sees the shares right away.

All you have to do to install it is start with a Fedora 10 DVD, add the Amahi repository during the Fedora install, run hda-install (+ your unique install code) and you’re good to go. Configuring access rights and users takes another 2 or 3 minutes. That’s it.

And unlike Windows Home Server, RAID is a supported hardware configuration. What pushed me away from even trying WHS was the proprietary “Drive Extender” file-system.

I’m still trying to figure out a reasonable way to organize and store my digital life so it is both save and accessible when I’m traveling.

A properly designed server can improve performance many ways. People who are used to using Google to find things in an instant in hundreds of millions of web servers should not have to poke around in a file-system to find stuff. Individual users can have millions of files these days. They need a way to find them if they are going to access them. A few gadgets added to a file server make it really useful. RAID on the server can make it faster, too.

My family just moved to a newer house. As the basement was unfinished, a gigabit/s LAN was installed over the holiday period. A dual-socket quad-core monster server with 4 1TB drives should be able to manage a ton of apps on the local server. Sure, this is more than we need, but we want it. Storage is nearly empty and without a search engine I have a hard time to find anything. SWISH-e or Gallery is in order. There are 6 PCs in the house. The ISP gives us up to 28 mbits/s. It is a brave new world even for old-fashioned file serving.

It’s true NAS and home servers aren’t the same. NAS is more of a traditional file server. Home servers try to be everything. As for Time Machine. Never used it. So I don’t know how it works. But I’m betting it’s a matter of how you have it set up. As I understand Macs, they mount storage devices in a similar way to Linux. So you should be able to coax it to work.

I’m not sure what you mean by “Mac like”. But working over a network is always going to be slower than working on a local hard drive. That’s why “streaming” is employed to play back large media files over a network.

I would buy a reasonably priced Apple home server in a heart beat. I have been looking into buying a used Mac Mini and a copy of Mac OS 10.5 Server on Ebay. I figure I can buy a used Core2Duo Mini for about $450 and a copy of Leopard Server for about $150. I would then slap in 1 TB drive for about another $100. So, for about $700, I can put together a home server running Leopard. The only thing I haven’t researched yet is whether I can also use the server as a central iTunes media server and DVR. (I just ordered a Tube Stick so that I can record TV to my Mac)

Bottomline, the home ‘whatever’ needs to securely store and share all your home stuff (music, video, photos, addressbooks, private docs, etc) in the house and let you access them when you’re on the road. Of course it has to be easy to use, and work across platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and across devices (media players, phones, game consoles, VoIP phones, etc). Since the digital home is so fluid it will have to be upgradeable and reconfigurable … sounds like an open source solution will be required.

The open source home server from http://www.amahi.org meets all these base requirements – I’ll bet you’ll be able to find it preinstalled on some great OEM hardware in the not too distant future!

Apple is great at their software design – maybe instead of a “home server” they come up with a piece of software that helps tie together all of the storage devices and helps people manage their digital “stuff”