My server is a phone now

"My phone is a server now"would've been better--> built in battery backupIsn'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%? reply: Most phones won't boot without the battery. Obvious workaround is to connect a power supply (and large cap) directly to the BMS, but in my experience most phones will shut themselves down when they think they've drawn more than the capacity of their battery, even if the voltage is still high. You can sometimes get around that by rebooting the device every couple of hours (and there might be a software/firmware fix in some cases?), but it's a lot less annoying to just accept a small risk of a house fire.

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. 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.you also can't bind to ports on any android phone unless you root, and rooting often requires an unlocked bootloader and not all android phones support bootloader unlocking. so you can't run a web server unless you somehow run it through a proxy server, or containers at native speed on postmarket os because you will not be able to flash the phone with postmarket os nor root the phone.not all android phones can have their bootloaders unlocked unless you find an exploit. https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame

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.

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 reply: A couple of old phones and a gaming laptop with a broken screen makes a beast of a cluster

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 thought this was going to be a rant about QR code menus. reply: Can you please tell me more? I'm trying to build a self hosted application (with Claude) so people can scan a QR code and place orders / send messages to the kitchen without having to flag down a server / waiter. It is supposed to save time and money for the restaurant and for the patrons and customers it is supposed to be more convenient. Do you not like this option?

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. reply: That's a test of the software more than the hardware. I run a lot of stuff on low-powered hardware and the main problems are when the software allocates a ton of memory unnecessarily (Java software is usually the worst offender) or does a million things for each request that are either unnecessary or duplicate.Any efficient blog software will handle HN fine on anything that you can call a smartphone, so like maybe not a Nokia with GPRS and 6MB on-board storage, but something like the Samsung S2 from 2011 that basically shipped as a Linux box -- just need to adb push ARM binaries for a webserver

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.