Helm v1 user here, very happy with the product. For 99% of people without the desire and skills to run their own servers, this is the best solution.
Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
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Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#62A raspberry pi 4 can do everything this machine does.
I have a raspberry pi and tried to run something like this and it is just so much work. So I bought a Helm v2 and like it thus far for photo backup and my secondary newsletter email domain.
If there was a company offering an auto update OS service with nextcloud and email for Pi I would love to see it! Better yet if it tied to encrypted cloud backup/restore too.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#63This should be encouraged and supported. While I do have many questions, which would definitely delay an impulse buy, it is of general interest to have more companies trying to create easy to use products that help people to cut the cord with 5 companies that rules our digital lives today. Now on with the questions I'd love to clarify: - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware? - Can we…
Great questions:
> - How to ensure the hardware is not chipped with some low level spyware?
We use a verified boot process to ensure trusted bits are running on the HW.
> - Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be?
Not yet - but we are planning for customers to be able to run their own services in the future. We have quite a few updates to do before we get there. The upgrades happen OTA, seamlessly in the background. There is no root access on the machine locally or remotely.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#64Looks really cool, but the subscription is a total dealbreaker. I might pick one up used a few years down the line if someone manages to load custom operating systems on it.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#65Helm v1 user here, very happy with the product. For 99% of people without the desire and skills to run their own servers, this is the best solution.
I am a Helm v2 user and I agree. I got tired trying to keep a NAS running and later configuring a Raspberry Pi 4 correctly to run off the right disks, stay up to date, and configured correctly for NextCloud. With two kids I don't have time to tinker.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#66According 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 the first thing this "personal server that lives where you do" does is spin up some AWS instance? No thank you.
If the TLS is terminated on the device and all it's using AWS for is a static ip and inbound port for email, that seems pretty harmless.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#67From [1]:
> Does Helm have access to my emails?
> The architecture of the system has been designed so that it's not possible for Helm to access your emails. Email senders now support sending emails over an encrypted SSL/TLS channel where the email is only decrypted once it reaches your personal email server. Helm is not able to decode these emails because we don't have access to the encryption key. In the limited situations where the sender's email server doesn't send the email to you over SSL/TLS, Helm does not log or store these messages and therefore we are still not able to access them.
SSL/TLS is transport security, and email is inherently multi-hop, so this reads as bogus to me: each hop might use SSL/TLS but that doesn't mean the message content or metadata is end-to-end encrypted until it gets to my Helm server.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#68Earlier 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…
Do the customers have the right to republish the source? Under the GPL (I checked GPLv3) I don't think they do, but this section (my emphasis) is unclear to me:
> You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways...
Is "under the terms of this License" a clarifying clause that narrows down exactly which "Corresponding Source" we are talking about? That doesn't seem necessary given that "Corresponding Source" is already well defined. Alternatively, does it mean that you must convey the Corresponding Source and grant a GPLv3 license to the conveyees for that source? If so, it could be written more clearly.
If my second interpretation is correct, surely it doesn't matter much that the company has a slightly user-unfriendly policy to providing their source code - someone will just mirror the code on Github anyway.
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No, the GPL covers this case. In the FAQ linked in the parent comment, check out the "High or low fees, and the GNU GPL" section. In particular, section 6(b) of GPLv3: > Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that produ…
Gotcha, thank you!
Re: Helm is a personal server that lives where you do
#70A raspberry pi 4 can do everything this machine does.
Actually no. There is no support for secure boot or proper encrypted storage with a protected key. We prototyped on Pis a while back before we shipped our v1 but there are meaningful limitations.
1. Secure boot is supported on Raspberry Pi, just not out-of-the-box. There's plenty of solutions in this field for your respective needs.
2. Raspberry Pi supports LUKS perfectly fine, making disk encryption a snap.