Home Assistant and computrace (absolute software)

Hi team,

I searched the web but couldn’t really find anything about this topic.

Let me introduce myself, i’ve been using home assistant for a couple of months now on a RPi3 but i really wanted to step up my hardware.

So i decided to go with a Dell mini pc Installation.
Apparently the dell pc has an activated computrace (anti theft) security in it and it’s activated. I researched the web and decided to approach the company Absolute to remove the security patch. (Ive heard that it could potentially be a backdoor for malware etc).

According to the company the machine is not reported for theft and could be removed by them. But i have to do the final Step by permanently disabling the computrace in the bios. And here comes the fun part, I don’t have that option in the bios. So i approached the company again and according to them I need solve this with Dell but until then the option will stay activated. I don’t have any receipts etc so Dell can’t do anything for me.

I also researched on the internet but i got no where.

Here is my main question, again for security reasons because i am planning to put my camera feed etc on this system. i installed hassio directly on the hard drive so no VM etc. Does computrace (absolute) activate on hassio? According to many people on the internet it does activate on windows/mac/android and linux but I can’t find anything about having hassio as a main server.

Is anyone familiar with that?

Thank you!

It only calls home if you install Windows. The Bios code re-installs the agent into Windows.

If you install Linux it won’t call home.

Source: Used to work for Absolute

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/wiihs1/does_computrace_even_matter_if_im_going_to_be/

Thank you Nick for your reply.

Just to be sure, i didn’t install Linux (even though a lot of sites do say that it will Call home with Linux), i only installed the home assistant core on the hdd. So im assuming that the backdoor that absolute is using also don’t start?

I don’t want that backdoor to be open for potential hacker’s etc.

Again thanks for the answer

You did install linux. Haos is linux.

Aah thank you Nick! I didn’t realize that haOs was linux. Learned another thing today.:+1:t3::wink: