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Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

thehelm.com

31–40 of 226 posts

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

#31

If I could reliably transfer my gmail legacy freebie grandfather thing account without it taking 7 to 11 days of API rate limited transfer at 100% luck, I would get my email out of there. Alas.

Fire up gyb [0] now, and by the time this (or whatever solution you want) is ready for an import, you'll be done.

0. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back

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

#32
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 don't think the do actually. Not with "a hardware root of trust" in the description.

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

#34

If I could reliably transfer my gmail legacy freebie grandfather thing account without it taking 7 to 11 days of API rate limited transfer at 100% luck, I would get my email out of there. Alas.

Would Google Takeout not suffice in this, maybe after some post-processing?

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

#35

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.

The required subscription also means it's useless if they go out of business.

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

#36

According to their blog post How Helm Works - Part 1: Networking [0], on the AWS side of things, for each Helm unit, they are provisioning an EC2 instance, an Elastic IP, and a Route 53 config. I suppose the 128GB backup is also part of this. From my perspective, $99/yr is not a bad deal for all this to be automatically managed. [0] https://blog.thehelm.com/post/how-helm-works-part-1-networki...

So you're tied to an EC2 instance? That seems like an unnecessary centralization point.

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

#37
post #22

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…

Synology boxes phone home, to Chinese IP space no less.

> to Chinese IP space no less

What's wrong with this?

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

#38
I received my Helm v2 last week and it has worked great for Android photo backup and email subscriptions like substack. I have not been bold enough yet to move my primary email domain over yet. Apple mail and Fairmail on Android give a nice non-web email experience.

I like the product concept, the execution seems solid, and I like the auto update flow compared to manual update of most NAS products.

I really want this product when my kids get their first phone to keep their photos, calendar and emails off the cloud. At least until they can make the choice that they want that stuff being tracked.

Edit: Oh and I really like their user experience around creating generated device specific passwords for each client device (phone, laptop, etc) a user owns.

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

#39
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html It’s perfectly ok to charge for GPL software. Providing the source on a physical medium for a price is reasonable because no one should be forced to run a digital distribution setup and infrastructure just because they build software that derives from GPL pieces. Their customers have a right to receive a copy of the source. But the company is not obliged to host an onli…

Hypothetically, could one not use this to get around GPL by modifying GPL software and agreeing to make the changes available to others but only at a ridiculous price?
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