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Helm is a personal server that lives where you do

thehelm.com

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are lumping in all tech companies in with big tech, we should all be concerned about that.

People who are consciously trying to de-couple from big tech are the same people who are conscious about lock-in effects.

Not only that, those are one of the big reasons for the migration away.

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

#132
If I'm drawing an analogy here, owning your server and hosting your own services is like having your own house and having a SAAS is like renting a house.

A lot of people want to own their house while too many service/hardware providers are trying to be your landlords.

This is a cool idea but I think having a mandatory subscription killed it for me. It does not even provide an illusion that I can still have my own services intact and running indefinitely no matter what happens to or at the service provider. This is especially crucial when you consider how much of a pain switching email is.

Do I move out of Google just to be dependent on another company that requires a subscription for the illusion of owning my data? On top of that I have to deal with all the hassle that comes with it? I don't think so.

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

#133

Many people here, including myself, are heavily turned off by the mandatory subscription that costs as much for 2 years as an entire device. However, the service provided as part of the subscription, a static IP address forwarding to your device without terminating the TLS connection is actually cool. For about 30$/year (24$ sounds good), I'd absolutely buy that alone, since that's the key to the tag line - truly pri…

Not directly competing with Helm, but we at Hoppy Network provide a static IP over WireGuard. It came out of a desire for "truly private email". We provide:

Clean IPv4 + IPv6 address, Reverse DNS, unblocked ports, unfiltered ICMP

It's priced reasonably to keep bad actors out:

https://hoppy.network

We have a $60/year plan in the works, which will be available before the end of this year.

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

#134
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like a stupid design decision at that point to have a dedicated instance per user. For a pass-through they could multiplex tens of thousands of customers easily onto a single instance.

No, SMTP runs on port 25 only. You need an IP per end mailserver if you are not terminating TLS on the multiplexer.

It's not stupid.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For IP, you can get a domain adress from namecheap then set up dynamic DNS ( https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx... ). Maintenance/security.. log in from time to time and run 'apt update && apt upgrade' ?

residential IP addresses are generally blacklisted by email services

yeah but so are AWS ips

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would love to see what documentation you have around both of these points. I have not seen anything that indicates the SoC for the Pi supports eFuse or any other OTP storage.

Not OP, but this looks promising after a little searching: https://askubuntu.com/questions/599825/yubikey-two-factor-au...

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

#137
So, I'm highly attracted to the marketing (I work in the "personal server" market, mostly reselling NAS devices). Overall I'm a bit disappointed with the price per capability ($450 + $100 every year after that for a 1TB server from what I'm reading). But as one the first forays into what I feel is a huge upcoming market, it's fair to start at a premium price point as you experiment with different form factors/features/costs/etc.

I more personally lament the creeping buzzword-ification of "personal server" messaging. There's a burgeoning array of different underlying meanings for the terms "personal", "server", "own your own data", "full privacy", etc. It seems likely that terms like these will continue grow in popularity with adwords searches, so you can expect more companies and products to use this claim to sell a particular architecture with a potentially large set of technical trade-offs between various ideas of "server ownership".

Ultimately where I think the general trend towards "server ownership" will land, like all new important technologies as they get integrated into the rest of society, is with a company/product that best navigates a rather tricky balance between the affirmed value of "ownership" (et cetera) vs the individual's willingness to get their hands dirty with a slightly more sophisticated, but more robust understanding of the underlying architecture.

Put simply; the less the "end-user" knows about the fundamentals of their personal computing stack, the less capable they'll be when it comes time to reason about the right decisions for them regarding privacy, security, modularity, longevity, and the other various desirable properties of a personal computing stack that truly meets their needs (as parents, citizens, businesspeople, etc). The victor of this trend will be the one that best facilitates true "end-user" empowerment, with minimal gotchas.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you got that the device would be bricked. Can you point me to where you saw this? All data is accessible on local ports on the LAN, with or without the subscription service.

The subscription not being optional ("We don't make the subscription optional at this time", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28351035 ), with unspecified consequences of not having one. One thing I definitely gather from that comment is that E-Mails wouldn't work, which appears to be the main selling point of the device.

There is an ongoing cost for email to work (static IP, DNS, tunneling for traffic) - this is why there is a subscription. It's not very complicated or malicious.

If a customer doesn't want a subscription, they can still use the Helm on their local network and get access to all their data. Running without a subscription is not something we currently support because of a lot of variables that can prevent email from working consistently, creating a heavy support burden (which is costly) along with bad customer experiences. It's best for people wary of a subscription to go down the DIY path (and we end up with a lot of DIY switchers once they realize how much effort it is).

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

#139
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see what documentation you have around both of these points. I have not seen anything that indicates the SoC for the Pi supports eFuse or any other OTP storage.

Not OP, but this looks promising after a little searching: https://askubuntu.com/questions/599825/yubikey-two-factor-au...

Great for laptops/desktops, horrible for servers. You would have to be present for the challenge/response on a reboot. Also, doesn't solve the secure boot issue. FDE w/o secure boot isn't particularly useful.
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