"My phone is a server now"

would've been better

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> built in battery backup

Isn't it always recommended to remove battery if you plan to use a phone or a laptop as a server? ( Fire hazard )

or is it fine to just limit the charging to 80%?

I still think the best bang for your buck is an old desktop PC. Something like an i5 with 8GB RAM and an SSD will suit 99% of home server uses with capacity to spare.

Even in this environment of inflated hardware prices, you can get one for a reasonable price.

Although I do see the appeal in getting unconventional hardware to do what you want, just for the love of the game.

FYI you can't do this on phones with locked bootloaders as well as the author did. you could use termux but if termux runs on anything lower than android 8 termux will be significantly limited and you will need postmarketos and maybe fix support for it. with termux, at best things will be slow without root, as the author mentioned rooting resulted in a speed increase.

without root, you also can't bind to ports on any android phone, and rooting often requires an unlocked bootloader and not all android phones support bootloader unlocking. You also need an unlocked bootloader to install postmarket os.

so without binding to ports you can't run a web server unless you run it through a proxy server which the author did, or containers at native speed on postmarket os because you will not be able to flash the phone with postmarket os if you have missing kernel syscalls on android nor root the phone for the speed increase on android depending on your android kernel version i assume.

so with android containers may or may not work without emulating x86, and without root chances are it will be slow specially if you are forced to emulate it as x86 because it turns out you have missing syscalls, nor root to make them faster if they exist on android. again no chances to install postmarket os nor rooting to make containers faster, without bootloader unlocking.

not all android phones can have their bootloaders unlocked unless you find an exploit. https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame

Yeah ‘old phones’ are pretty capable devices.

I’ve wondered for a while if they could be used as an extension to your laptop like the old 80s PCs where you would plug in hardware.

So ‘make it a server’ is the obvious way I guess, and then you could do things like render webpages on there and then stream them as images to your actual computer (like the now shutdown Mighty app), or run ffmpeg on there to convert a video, etc

Nice writeup but use legacy phone is really need to do some tuning and hacks, but that's fun to do if one like it.

For me I have a 24x7 running intel gen 11 nuc, i am lucky to get it installed with 32G memory and two NVME disks years ago and cannot image add those memory and NVME disk with much higher price

Just run some docker and VM on that, use cloudflare tunnel or tailscale funnel if you want to expose some service to the wild internet

I recently even find a pixel 5 and passthrough it to the openclaw VM on that nuc, let it browse the X to find some posts and relax me from doom scrolling, though seems timeline still bad and no much valued post find.

Cool project, but slightly better: before the rampocalypse I bought one of those aliexpress fanless linux boxes designed to be a router. I put a 32GB stick of ram in it and a 250GB SSD. I run opnsense in a virtual machine to serve as my home router and then I put the rest of my home server stuff on other virtual machines on that same box. It's still fanless/silent. It takes up zero additional space because it is my router. It would already be running 24/7 because it is my router so the additional energy usage of an additional VM is likely minuscule. The latency to my router is basically zero since it is on the same physical box. And it is using a real SSD so it has faster storage with almost certainly better endurance.

Those saying it's said backwards clearly aren't self-hosters!

iPhone hardware wise is like an amazing alternative to rpi (way better hardware)

But the software makes no sense at all for a server, with screen locking due to inactivity and whatnot, not to mention energy and network priority is designed around a consumer use case on the move.

If you run Linux on it and take advantage from the Apple hardware like the light sensors and accelerometer - maybe it makes sense for measuring wave height, sky color, attached to a buoy or oil rig or something, you can even show it on a map due to its GPS. Assuming the oil rig has WiFi or a cell phone booster.

Idk though, maybe for something that important you just get the right stuff - cool hobby nonetheless.

I thought this was going to be a rant about QR code menus.

I thought about this a few times but the flash storage is a bit sketchy for running a database, I am worried it can die. Tho android does have sqlite built in and works fine.

I did a similar thing recently.

I run kube in a VM, and it was ressource constrained.

I hooked an old samsung to my pc and have let claude handle everything.

I only had to unlock the bootloader, flash the image claude uploaded.

It rebuilt postmarketos multiples times to enable various flag, and now there is a kube node running on it.

I plan to do this when I buy a new phone, thank you for the great writeup!

Would have been a fun load test had you hosted your blog on the phone.

Shouldn't it be "My phone is a server now"?

I've never heard of Surf but I can run 10x camoufox instances on a $8 VPS no problem. I highly recommend it.

keeping phones connected to power 24/7 is a fire hazard

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