[HN Gopher] How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
___________________________________________________________________
How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
Related ongoing thread: _This blog is now hosted on a GPS /LTE
modem (2021)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46049981
Author : louismerlin
Score : 326 points
Date : 2025-11-22 18:16 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (far.computer)
(TXT) w3m dump (far.computer)
| agentifysh wrote:
| so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to
| make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect
| these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that?
|
| ive been looking to build and serve my own servers and i have
| been considering to use old android phones to outright racks but
| the part I am still struggling to figure out is how to serve it
| publicly without ISP catching on as they require business plans
| for that and its not cheap
| 1bpp wrote:
| A Wireguard tunnel via a free tier or dirt cheap VPS, or a VPN
| provider that lets you forward ports like Proton
| agentifysh wrote:
| but can't the ISP still see something is up if there is
| traffic 24/7
| srean wrote:
| Don't ISP's just charge per caps on ingress and egress
| volume?
|
| From your comments it is clear that they don't. Super
| infuriating. Why should they care what I do with ingress
| and outgress that I paid for, as long as I am not hurting
| them.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| His comments are based on fear-mongering he read
| somewhere or an overly-literal interpretation of terms
| and conditions written to cover the ISP's ass in every
| theoretical situation possible.
|
| ISPs who enforce data caps already priced it in and
| technically have an incentive for you to exceed your cap
| as fast as possible so you pay to increase said cap (they
| can however still slow down your traffic as they wish, to
| ensure sufficient capacity for everyone).
|
| ISPs who don't enforce a cap actually still internally
| enforce a reasonable cap of several terabytes at their
| discretion. And of course, they can and will use traffic
| shaping to ensure the integrity of their network so your
| usage doesn't affect others. If you exceed that soft cap
| consistently several months in a row they _may_ get in
| touch, but other than that you 're fine.
|
| TLDR: host your server and enjoy. When you get to the
| scale of the next YouTube, then you have to worry.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Yes, though even though they can see that, as long as it's
| encrypted they can't know for sure, so as long as you don't
| cause problems they won't care at all that you're using it
| for _something_. In all my years I 've never had an ISP
| complain about constant encrypted traffic, though some ISPs
| do have general data caps like Comcast.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Amount of traffic is what matters. Are you saturating your
| pipe 24/7 for an entire month? Sure, you may have problems.
| But you'd have the same problems if you were torrenting
| (let's assume legal torrents here, I am not talking about
| copyright) or hosting a mega LAN party with hundreds of
| people streaming their games all at once.
|
| Otherwise, no worries.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Would use less bandwidth than wi-fi cameras that are
| uploading 24/7.
| rlupi wrote:
| A CloudFlare tunnel?
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...
|
| Although, you may also go with a 5$ virtual host (e.g. Linode
| Nanode 1 GB) and wireguard to build your own tunnel (or just
| the 5$ virtual host to run your server)
| agentifysh wrote:
| i see so just run cf tunnel and ISP wouldn't be able to see I
| am hosting web apps? what if I am streaming large files (not
| torrent)? couldn't they see the bandwidths being consumed and
| then tell me to upgrade to business ?
| eptcyka wrote:
| What kind of an ISP prohibits self-hosting?
| flockonus wrote:
| Heavily depends on the contract with your ISP, I'm not
| aware of anything saying you can't use your uplink
| "commercially" - how one would even define and monitor
| that?
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Yes, an ISP could see that you're using a lot of traffic.
| But if the traffic is encrypted, they can't be sure _what_
| you 're doing. Are you a personal user? Or are you a
| business? How would they know if it's all encrypted?
|
| As for the volume of traffic you're sending, you need to
| read the terms of your ISP contract, at least a little.
| Your ISP could have volume limits (e.g. only 5TB of traffic
| per month), and if you reach those limits, they could
| temporarily suspend service. But if they can't see what
| you're doing, and you're within the technical and
| contractual limits of your service agreement, and you're
| not causing problems for them, then an ISP is not going to
| care what you do.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| at this point you don't need the phone :D
| shevy-java wrote:
| It used to be easier to get a web server up and running in the
| past. I remember the 1990s fondly.
|
| Not sure what changed, but things got more complex - and more
| expensive, too.
| teo_zero wrote:
| > Not sure what changed
|
| IP4 address exhaustion.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > don't ISPs detect these and ban
|
| No. No ISP who desperately tries to grow marketshare at all
| costs and lock their customers into a year-long contract will
| intentionally ban users. I'm not even sure where this
| misconception comes from, it's not like ISPs led a massive PR
| campaign warning people of the dangers of running a server.
|
| The only way you will get banned is if you cause
| disproportionate strain on their network, which means you'd
| need to exceed the usage of the typical gamer (downloading
| games worth hundreds of gigs regularly), streamer (streaming 4k
| video for hours at a time), cloud backup customer (uploading
| gigabytes regularly), Windows user (in its default
| configuration Windows can use P2P to share updates), torrenter
| (sustained full-duplex bandwidth usage), and unlucky idiot with
| a compromised device spewing DoS traffic at line-rate.
|
| Saturate the pipe consistently for several days by hosting
| video? Yeah sure you could get a warning and eventually
| disconnected, assuming they don't already have traffic shaping
| solutions in place to just silently throttle you to an
| acceptable level and leave it up to you to move your homebrew
| YouTube clone elsewhere when you realize it's too slow.
|
| Hosting a website which will have a few mbps worth of traffic
| with the occasional spike? That's a rounding error compared to
| your normal legitimate usage, so totally fine.
|
| The reason most consumer ISPs have a clause against running
| servers (not even defining what counts as a server) is to
| preempt a potential business starting a data center off a
| collection of consumer connections and then bitching about it
| or demanding compensation when it goes down or they get cut
| off. Nobody cares about a technical user playing around and
| hosting a blog at home.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| ISPs don't care, actually. They care about operational
| problems, but you serving a constant stream of web traffic is
| probably not going to matter to them; web traffic for even a
| pretty successful blog is going to be a tiny volume compared to
| you streaming 4k movies from Netflix.
|
| ISPs will have rules (maximum data volume per month) and
| restrictions (ISP equipment auto-drops all sending/receiving
| packets on port 25, 80, 443, or 456), but within those limits
| the ISPs do not care as long as you cause no problems for them.
|
| Also, one of the easiest ways to expose e.g. port 80 of your
| in-house server is to just have your local server do an SSH
| port-forward to a remote server like a cheap VPS. Note that by
| default it'll bind to a localhost port on the remote, so on the
| remote you'd need to have an HTTP server reverse proxying to
| the remote localhost:8080, or you need to enable `GatewayPorts:
| yes` in sshd on the remote. Assuming you turn on GatewayPorts
| on remote.example.com, here's how you could expose port 80 of
| localhost: # Run this on in-your-house-
| computer to allow folks on public internet to visit #
| remote.example.com:80 but have the traffic served by in-your-
| house-computer:80 ssh -R :80:localhost:80
| username@remote.example.com
|
| You can make the above connection permanent by setting up
| `autossh` on in-your-house-computer.
| euroderf wrote:
| Would this involve "the usual" dangers of someone hacking the
| in-your-house server ?
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Yes, with asterisks. If you're serving static files from
| your house, the risk of having your server taken over is
| incredibly low. If you're hosting Wordpress on your home
| server, that risk spikes massively. So make sure you
| understand what is and is not dangerous, and of course,
| only expose the "low risk parts" to the outside world.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| If you're already paying someone monthly to "forward" ports,
| why not just pay for a blog somewhere? Way more secure.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Cause the server in your house is a lot cheaper to upgrade
| with more RAM/storage than a VPS. By using a VPS as just a
| way to make traffic available, you can choose an extremely
| cheap VPS. It's pretty easy to find places that'll charge
| you $2 USD/month for a tiny VPS with 1TB monthly data
| transfer allowances; for $5 you can get unlimited data
| transfer. There's tons of good deals.
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Other folks have given general answers, but I'm wondering, what
| ISP do you have, and where?
|
| (I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that
| actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric
| as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not
| shutting down anybody's servers.)
| prmoustache wrote:
| Why would your ISP ban you?
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Many ISP don't care.
|
| Some may block port 80 and 443 "For Security", but you can
| sometimes contact the support and they'll open it, even if
| you're not a business.
|
| I have a webserver running at home and use the free dynamic dns
| from noip.com.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > don't ISPs detect these and ban
|
| No? I mean, I'm sure there are ISPs out there that do it, but
| that's a ridiculous thing to do.
| louismerlin wrote:
| In my experience (in Germany and Switzerland) ISPs don't care,
| but they will rotate everybody's IP once or twice a year.
|
| Friends from other countries, India for example, have had
| different experiences though, where IPs were on a much more
| frequent rotation and required scripted solutions.
| clueless wrote:
| Title should be updated to include "unused android phone"
| mceachen wrote:
| "unused android phone with unlocked bootloader that is
| supported by postmarkOS"
|
| (or maybe be able to use recovery zip that requires effort
| after every reboot)
| shevy-java wrote:
| Nothing beats my toaster serving my webpages.
| iberator wrote:
| Of course it runs NetBSD
| a96 wrote:
| More an exception than a rule these days, sadly.
|
| Though they might still have an edge on toasters.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| This sounds like a fun project. A perfect use for an old android
| phone sitting in the junk drawer.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| For some reason, I never buy phones that work with postmarketOS
| :( And I find phone naming confusing, it's difficult to find a
| used one locally to play with. Is it a Moto Play 2018 or a Play
| 2020? Trying to get that information from someone on Facebook
| marketplace is like pulling teeth.
| sexeriy237 wrote:
| Ebay bro, play 2020 was $25 last time i got one. dont mess with
| fb sellers
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That makes sense. Most phone users aren't technical. Like -- at
| all.
|
| If you can think about how deep into technicalities the most
| average person you know gets, then you can also understand that
| ~half of everyone is even less technical than that.
|
| There's nothing wrong with this. That's just the way that it
| is. (We can accept this or be frustrated. Acceptance is more
| useful.)
|
| As a workaround, I find that searching by part number provides
| a good filter.
|
| Maybe I want a very particular Moto G Power to use for
| whatever. I don't search for any permutation of "Motorola G
| Power" at all, because that description doesn't help me.
|
| Instead, I just find the part number (maybe something like
| "XT2041-7") and search for that instead.
|
| This excludes a _lot_ of listings straight away, and that 's
| fine: I don't want to stumble through listings from people who
| don't know what they have. I only want to buy what I want to
| buy, and what I want is an XT2041-7.
| officeplant wrote:
| All my old phones used to become BOINC nodes doing
| WorldCommunityGrid or seti@home, at least until we got to the
| point where you couldn't run the phone without a battery anymore.
| Came home to one too many spicy pillow'd phones even keeping them
| in a cool area with a rigged up fan blowing on them.
| ChrisbyMe wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder if using a regular sff pc fan might work
| if you don't need the touchscreen.
|
| Just thermal paste to the battery hah
| officeplant wrote:
| I do Wigle wardriving with a dedicated cheap phone these
| days. (Moto G Stylus 2023)
|
| In order to prevent issues this time around I've preemptively
| removed the back of the phone, and the camera modules so I
| can have a nice flat phone. Then I bought a heatsink nearly
| the same size as the phone itself. I've got thermal pads on
| the SoC which sits lower than the battery and the heatsink
| itself had thermal adhesive on it pre-applied which is
| sticking to the battery/phone frame holding it to the phone.
| No more phone overheating worries and if the battery goes
| pillowy it should just pop the heatsink up instead of warping
| the whole phone.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| hardcore Wigler right there :)
| jjice wrote:
| The thing that holds me back from this is always the battery. I
| want to have my battery removed so that it doesn't eventually
| become a time bomb, but it's a pain on modern phones and I'm not
| even sure if they boot without. The mobile hardware reuse space
| can suck for hobbyists.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Most phones can have battery removed somewhat destructively,
| but without affecting the rest of the phone.
|
| Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the
| battery should be safe virtually indefinitely - the battery
| management on board will keep it in a state where its a
| constant charge which means the chemistry will be stable.
| jprd wrote:
| I'm not educated enough in this area to have any expertise,
| however, in my personal experience leaving a lithium-ion
| battery plugged all the time results in scary semi-exploded
| batteries that also stop working.
|
| Would you say this is a chemistry/QA problem? Have there been
| advances in battery / controller technology that achieves the
| above?
| fao_ wrote:
| Yeah I was about to say the same thing! I leave my steam
| deck plugged in all the time (it is my main computer) and
| the battery still popped (valve replaced it for free ofc)
| kqr wrote:
| How uh, does one find out about battery problems? I almost
| exclusively use laptops, and I tend to leave them plugged
| in most of the time. I don't want a sudden lithium-ion
| battery fire. Can I detect ahead of time that things are
| going bad?
|
| (My current machine is a Thinkpad P52 if it matters, but I
| also use older Macbooks and newer Thinkpads and older Dell
| machines this way, although they're plugged in less often
| these days.)
| mkesper wrote:
| 1. Improve longevity by charging Li-Ion only up to 85% of
| marketed capacity (can be configured at least on
| Thinkpads).
|
| 2. Open up the laptop and check if battery is swollen.
| After about 10 years, it's also a good idea to replace
| the CMOS battery before leaking.
|
| 3. Without opening, sometimes keys/trackpads don't work
| anymore as expected. This might be due to swollen battery
| packs (we had several Dells where this happened).
| fainpul wrote:
| With old MacBooks, the bottom bulges out and you notice
| because it doesn't sit on the four rubber feet anymore
| but on one central point - it wobbles and you can spin it
| around.
| munk-a wrote:
| There were several generalizations in that statement that
| align with my similar fears to the OP. Most firmware should
| minimize the charge cycling, most batteries should be stable
| at constant charge... most isn't great for something that I
| want to sit in the corner undisturbed for a decade just
| chugging along - I have a few old desktops I use whenever I
| need a stand alone server or to host something web-live for a
| while. They'll eventually have hardware failures, but I have
| a lot more confidence that when they fail it won't be
| dramatic or destructive - ditto with old laptops, the
| serviceability expectations are much higher than phones so I
| have yet to meet a laptop I can't pop open and just pull the
| battery out of to run on AC alone - in the case of a power
| failure the UPS can't cover I'd rather the machine just power
| off rather than needing to deal with the possibility of
| dramatic failure.
|
| I think if you're considering re-harvesting old devices to
| use for hosting and get far enough down your list to get to
| phones then you've likely got enough constant maintenance
| costs in overseeing things that the additional worry of fire
| risk just isn't worth it.
| mkesper wrote:
| Every old hardware needing a fan is also a silent fire
| risk.
| zamadatix wrote:
| A fire risk? I think it'd be exceptionally rare for that
| kind of thing to lead to a fire instead of just dead
| parts (assuming no overtemperature protections). Even
| people with the 600 w melting GPU cables don't end up
| with an actual fire.
|
| Batteries, however, are absolute hellfire when they go
| wrong (because of chemistry - not just the temperature).
| scoot wrote:
| What makes your UPS any less of a fire timebomb?
| gruez wrote:
| It uses lead-acid batteries, for one.
| munk-a wrote:
| My UPS is a single device that I have accepted the cost
| of maintaining and require for my daily use computer - it
| has to be regularly replaced because the nature of UPSes
| is a very limited and usually well documented shelf-life.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Depends on your phone. Just has to replace the battery on a
| generally always-plugged in Moto (at least after a certain
| age). Battery had pillowed out. It's acting as our "landline"
| with a link2cell on some old DECT handsets.
| mcny wrote:
| if the power resets, the phone will boitloop without a
| battery?
| smeej wrote:
| Of the six old Android phones I have around, two of them I
| don't dare turn on due to swollen batteries. I guess it
| depends how old the devices are whether this was a real risk,
| but I won't leave devices plugged in anymore for this reason.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the
| battery should be safe virtually indefinitely_
|
| What is your source on this?
|
| I've replaced the battery in always-plugged-in iPhone 3 times
| over 10 years because it was expanding into a spicy pillow.
|
| I too want a way to run phones directly off of USB power,
| without a battery present.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Go to ifixit.com, look up your phone's battery replacement
| steps, stop half way through :)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah the first two times Apple did it for me. Then Apple
| stopped supporting battery replacements on a phone that
| old, so I ordered a battery replacement kit on Amazon and
| did it myself, with ifixit.com's assistance.
|
| Never again. I was genuinely shocked the thing turned on
| once I closed it up. It's one thing to have a conceptual
| understanding of how tiny the components inside a phone
| are. It's another thing to actually be trying to seat a
| plug into a socket with tweezers and just have no idea
| how you're supposed to tell if it's fully inserted or
| not.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I agree. But for removing batteries, could not be easier.
| The ifixit guides are especially good because they warn
| you of the stuff you could never anticipate when opening
| glued on cases.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| > I was genuinely shocked
|
| Could have been worse -- the sentence could have ended
| right there...
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Place the "server" into a shoebox. Place another shoebox on
| top, filled with sand. Tape together and hide behind a
| furniture.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| So the phone effectively becomes a 4U rack server that's
| _probably_ not much of a fire hazard. We 'll tuck it away
| behind some wood for extra safety. Never liked sleeping with
| my eyes shut anyway!
| xgulfie wrote:
| Then put that in a garage at least 50ft away from your home
| faidit wrote:
| Next, fully encase the garage in concrete. Surround it with
| a ring of jagged concentric spikes and skull symbols to
| warn future archaeologists.
| 6510 wrote:
| Red Magic can be set to not use the battery when the power
| cable is plugged in. (it is to avoid heating issues and not
| degrade the battery)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| In theory, you can replace the battery with a chunky enough
| capacitor (to get past the power-on surge) and a power source
| at the right voltage attached right where the battery would go.
| The soldering points are way too tiny for my amateur soldering
| skills, though.
| volumo wrote:
| Check out this method:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM
| yaky wrote:
| You could try to fake a battery instead:
| https://yaky.dev/2022-09-06-smartphone-without-battery/
|
| (This is for a removable battery, but should be close for
| built-in ones too, I suppose)
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| hopefully "bypass charging" becomes more of a thing in the
| future. a few of the latest pixel phones use it but the only
| other time ive seen it is on tablets aimed at gaming
| leobg wrote:
| > I grabbed a few power point timer switches, and set them to
| only over up the charger for a hour a day. Never had another
| battery puffing failure - at last not in the next 2 or 3 years
| before I left.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021233
| GTP wrote:
| They don't boot without it, but you can make it think that
| there's a battery by connecting power directly to the battery
| pins [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM&pp=ygUYZ3JlYXRzY...
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Don't even need postmarketOS.
|
| Simple root, with a custom degoogled rom, and termux is all you
| need.
| codethief wrote:
| Can't you just run a Linux VM on Android these days?
| zoobab wrote:
| "Simple root"
|
| You don't need root if you webserver is listening on a port
| over 1024.
|
| Termux plus some webserver like nginx is all you need.
|
| Now to make it reboot resistant is another story.
| hatmanstack wrote:
| Hell, even simpler. Termux + Caddy + cloudflared with a domain
| you own. Serving in 15 min.
| tonetheman wrote:
| As others have mentioned you have to watch the battery if you do
| this for real.
|
| The battery will swell and explode if you run 24x7 on a phone.
| qubex wrote:
| Call out to World Wide Web (no affiliation) that sets up a web
| server on an iOS/iPadOS (EUR9.99 for PRO,
| https://apps.apple.com/it/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id16230068...)
| denysvitali wrote:
| Should be merged with:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027554
| retrac wrote:
| If the device can run PostmarketOS with a mainstream kernel, then
| it can run any Linux distribution. (I put Arch ARM on such
| devices, since I like that distro.)
|
| That's the big hurdle though - mainstream kernel support.
|
| For most devices, even if they can be rooted and jailbroken,
| you're stuck with the kernel they come with. Doesn't have a new
| feature you need? A horrible security flaw in the network stack?
| You're out of luck. Most "repurpose your old phone" approaches
| have this problem. You can make it a server but you wouldn't want
| to expose it to the public Internet.
| norman784 wrote:
| Is Arch ARM officially supported by the same team? If not, what
| might be the reason?
| retrac wrote:
| x86_64 is the only official Arch Linux. All other ports are
| unofficial. They are community projects where many of the
| members are the same as the main Arch Linux.
|
| I think it's basically for the same reason as why they
| dropped 32-bit x86 support about 8 years ago. Not enough
| users. (That resulted in the unofficial Arch Linux 32 to
| maintain support.)
| throwaway1389z wrote:
| Arch is working to officially support ARM and non x86_64
| archs.
|
| https://rfc.archlinux.page/0032-arch-linux-ports/
| embedding-shape wrote:
| That RFC says "New ports are added by proposing them in
| an RFC. At least two package maintainers have to lead a
| port to ensure it will be developed longer term." but I'm
| not finding any RFC for ARM support, so can one say work
| is really officially happening on ARM?
| rovr138 wrote:
| The first step is setting up the project to allow other
| ports. That it can be done, what it will require, etc.
|
| Once that's done, then the ports can be submitted.
|
| Look at the maintainers and contributors on the
| unofficial arm port. Orce this RFC gets accepted, the arm
| port can propose and figure out how to merge things
| together.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds right to me, and sounds like you're
| agreeing with me that it isn't yet an official effort, as
| the RFC hasn't yet been merged, in contrast to what
| parent claimed.
| Muromec wrote:
| I think the reason is they don't want to become debian where
| deciding anything takes foverever. Another architecture is a
| liability, so it lives in another "project" that official
| arch is not committed to.
|
| I write this from arch on arm (orange pi) thingy, btw
| Retr0id wrote:
| s/mainstream/mainline/
|
| But yes, this is definitely an issue. I've been playing with a
| 2013-era Samsung device that came with a 3.0 kernel. It can run
| pmos with said kernel but there are multiple root LPE vulns.
| I've been looking into getting it to run a mainline kernel just
| for fun, but it's not going to be easy.
| pabs3 wrote:
| I note that Linux mainline has a device tree for the "Samsung
| Galaxy S1 (GT-I9000) based on S5PV210", not sure how complete
| it is though. Lots of others too: $ grep
| -rhoE 'Samsung Galaxy[^"]+' ./arch/arm*/boot/dts/ | sort -u
| monerozcash wrote:
| This is the kind of task I've found tools like Codex to be
| pretty good at. You just have to be able to give it good
| enough access to test and debug its work.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| The main question is WHY? I already have a 3570K box running our
| NAS, plex, Wifi repeater admin, etc, etc, and it would be trivial
| to put up a web server via python or something.. If I had any
| need for it.
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| How do I use your box to host my web server?
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Sure, a phone could work - but only if you don't already have
| another server anyway. The downsides of a phone are probably
| too much of a pain over a cheap $50 used server.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| maybe because phones have a battery (built in UPS) so they will
| keep running if the power goes out. its only useful if you have
| a router that can be powered by an external battery pack i
| supoose
| layer8 wrote:
| For some reason I was expecting a RasPi in a rotary phone
| enclosure.
| Jemm wrote:
| I use my old phone to proxy serial data to tcp. Also gives me
| macros and a video/audio feed. But most relevant to this is it
| has a built in webserver.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _This blog is now hosted on a GPS /LTE modem (2021)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46049981
| bdbdbdb wrote:
| It's through this link that I today discovered that a surface RT
| can run Linux. I think I got rid of mine already. Would have been
| nice to breathe some life into it
| karlkloss wrote:
| I can run a web server on a $1 microcontroller, so what?
| sgt wrote:
| I tried this once a few years ago.. had half a dozen Samsung
| Android phones running an SSH daemon with some functionality that
| could be remotely accessed. However, what I learned is that
| phones generally don't like to run 24/7 as servers. They start
| giving you trouble after a while, never figured out why.
|
| But I suspect it's just the "always on" nature and the battery.
| The usage pattern is just entirely different than having a phone
| in your pocket and using when you need it.
|
| You're welcome to try though, maybe phones got more reliable.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't think people generally turn off their phones so it
| would be interesting to learn exactly what the difference was.
| sgt wrote:
| Exactly but I suspect phones last longer when they are in
| idle/near sleep mode with screen off.
| jayd16 wrote:
| There was an era of mobile chips where they would clock
| very high for burst performance and get very warm, then
| throttle, and then repeat the cycle. It might be an issue
| of not properly getting into "sustained performance mode."
| phonkd wrote:
| better of compiling android kernel with docker support and using
| docker
| leobg wrote:
| I have an old iPhone XS lying around with a broken digitizer.
| Basically, it's recording phantom touch events all the time,
| making it unusable. Though the screen itself, camera, CPU etc.
| are all working fine.
|
| Any ideas what I can do with it to give it some purpose?
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Inspired by this, went to look into how much performance I can
| squeeze and turns out Qualcomm software practices are so bad that
| I can't do much but accept old software.
|
| It sounds like Qualcomm has to do everything from scratch on
| their hidden Linux software for every new chip.
| justmee wrote:
| There is a much easier way to do this without renting a VPS or
| anything. If you download and install the Localtonet application
| from Google Play or Termux, it is very easy to do.
| zoobab wrote:
| With proot-distro under Termux, you can also run a container with
| proot-docker script.
|
| Right now you have to find a skopeo binary for your arch, but
| that's WIP.
| guluarte wrote:
| psa: remove the battery just in case
| mixologic wrote:
| This sounds more like "How to add more devices to a botnet."
|
| Exposing a port isn't exactly a safe thing to do nowadays, and
| I'd be wary of the security posture of an "old phone". Proceed
| with caution.
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