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Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

thehelm.com

11–20 of 226 posts

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#12
I care about owning my own data very much. This makes me conservative when it comes to these solutions, despite otherwise being an early adopter of everything tech.

For that reason I always recommend Synology NAS machines. They have been around forever, they work for years on autopilot and feel very similar to a microwave in terms of operational overhead. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. But most importantly, the ecosystem is stable and mature. And they are easy to understand and reason about and come with a slick UI with mobile apps. My favorite feature is having my massive photo collection always available on my phone, served from my own basement (with encrypted AWS Glacier backups).

[EDIT] This is Brandon Phillips of CoreOS fame sharing this! Maybe I should take a closer look then.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#13
post #10

It seems they are targeting "normal" people (to whom word "dockerized" sounds like a misspelling of something happening in a port). Mixing "normal" people and self-hosted email is a recipe for very bad experience.

I suppose this is their gamble: can they make something that is so easy to use, even a normal person will be happy with it. That being said, how many “normal” people are really so concerned about email security that they don’t trust one of the big clouds?

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#14

Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.

It seems that Nextcloud, Postfix, and Strongswan are copyleft.

> You may obtain the complete corresponding source code from us for a period of three years after our last shipment of this product by sending a money order or check for $5 to:

Without being illegal this is rather hostile. But then again they are selling subscriptions to open-source software so I expected something shady.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#15
post #11

I feel like anyone technical enough to know and care what this product is, are also totally capable of setting it up themselves.

Are you saying that millions of people who order sunny side up egg breakfast aren't capable of making one for themselves? :)

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#16

Dockerized Nextcloud + Postfix + Dovecot + Strongswan + OpenLDAP + SpamAssassin running on an ARM machine. Sounds mostly alright, although it seems you cannot buy it without the $99/yearly subscription, which makes me wary. Sure, a static IP and domain registration is good, but it ought to be an optional addon.

It might be interesting to produce seriously cut down reimplementations of those utilities for purely home use.

Similar to how a home router/switch/NAS doesn't need anywhere near the same number of options and possible misconfigurations and code that isn't helping you at all.

(I'm skipping past all the issues with this particular unit by this particular company to the point that this is a good idea and I'd be nice to see a lot more options in this space along with less complexity...)

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#17
post #11

I feel like anyone technical enough to know and care what this product is, are also totally capable of setting it up themselves.

Are you saying that millions of people who order sunny side up egg breakfast aren't capable of making one for themselves? :)

In many cases, yes. But that is a poor comparison.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#18
post #7

No thanks, this wreaks of a monthly subscription I don't want that would result in unsupported buggy "hardware" in 10 years guaranteed. I'll keep my ZFS server with a text file reminding me how I configured it for now (since I usually forget after a few months)!

"reeks" was the word you wanted, I think

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#19

I care about owning my own data very much. This makes me conservative when it comes to these solutions, despite otherwise being an early adopter of everything tech. For that reason I always recommend Synology NAS machines. They have been around forever, they work for years on autopilot and feel very similar to a microwave in terms of operational overhead. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. But most importantly, the…

The device in TFA seems to primarily serve as a mailserver.

AIUI that's not really what a NAS does.

Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

#20

I care about owning my own data very much. This makes me conservative when it comes to these solutions, despite otherwise being an early adopter of everything tech. For that reason I always recommend Synology NAS machines. They have been around forever, they work for years on autopilot and feel very similar to a microwave in terms of operational overhead. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. But most importantly, the…

How do you access your NAS remotely? Does it end up creating some kind of backdoor into your network with cloud support? That makes me nervous…
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