Re:Helm: Personal Email Server
by johnmaguire2013 on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @02:43PM
(#18242280)
I'm pretty sure that video feed is actually sent to your phone through a Dropcam cloud server. Your Dropcam is a client which connects to the cloud server, as is your phone.
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Arguably that's the exact same architecture Helm are describing. The EC2 instance your Helm box VPNs into is (arguably) "the server" - in that it's the "public service" endpoint. A good lawyer could eloquently argue that the Helm device on your residential internet connection is no more "running as a server" than the Dropbox or Google Drive apps on your laptop or phone...
(Note: I've been doing a similar home-rolled version of this, where I have a mail server under my couch that opens a reverse ssh tunnel and forwards port 25 and 465 from whichever transient EC2/Azure/DigitalOcean/Hertzner/CloudAtCost VPS Ive got listed as my MX records. A little bit of Route53 API automation, some Ansible to set up the ssh tunnelling, and some "canary" gmail and live.com email addresses to check outbound deliverability when I go to switch VPSs... It's been running pretty much untouched since 2014 or so...)