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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

> how cool would it be if your smartphone (or pocket computer) functions as a server!?

Completely not cool, that is, pretty hot. And short-lived.

Mobile devices are only practical because they don't work 80-90% of time. Being awake for longer requires larger batteries. Being suddenly popular and thus withstanding much more load would just physically kill a node, by depleting its battery quickly and suddenly.

The luxury of peer to peer networks requires either a large power supply, or a limited availability of each node. If you introduce super-nodes with good power and constant connectivity, where weaker nodes can post their data to be cached and replicated, you just invent servers again.

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> Being awake for longer requires larger batteries.

What if you remove the battery altogether and use the phone as an alternative to a Raspberry Pi, instead of creating more e-waste?

If Android (or any other mobile OS) wasn't so locked down, we'd definitely be able to take more advantage of devices like that and not just for hosting stuff - they already have mobile data support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a microphone, camera, GPS, accelerometer and so on.

In regards to load, my blog did fine with one of the articles on the front page of HN way back, and it was served from a container that has about 1 CPU core given to it and under 1 GB of RAM (albeit it's still a rented VPS otherwise).

My homelab server CPUs have a TDP of 35W and I use those for CI as well with no issues. My netbook has a CPU with a TDP that's around 15W and it can serve web apps with no issues, alongside Visual Studio Code and a desktop environment.

A phone is almost certainly good enough for simple workloads as well, like serving static files or interacting with a SQLite database, assuming that your content wouldn't get too popular.

But having it be a server while in your pocket is probably too niche of a use case, rather than having it on a shelf somewhere, connected to a power cable.

I worked on that for a while, see http://janos.io . Interesting idea, but impractical due to the amount of work that needed to be done per device.

Except that it is much simpler and more straightforward for someone to pay for a super node to help serve all their content. You don't need to mess with setting up the server instance, configuring DNS or setting up services, and if you want to change super node providers you only have to reconfigure your client and you're done, no initial setup or DNS shenanigans.

No DNS shenanigans? Maybe! Then what, DHS shenanigans?

There must be some scheme of symbolic addressing. DNS, of all things, is reasonably decentralized, it only requires SOA records for top-level domains to be propagated in concert. (It has other shortcomings though.)

Probably something in the vein of a DHT. There is still a lot of progress that can be made in that area, in terms of performance, content addressing and cooperative/adversarial search strategies though.

I pick on DNS because it's an easy example of another thing you have to manage hosting your own content. Also, domain names are a hot mess and people mostly prefer to have identities ala Facebook, which could easily built into a decentralized protocol.

"Repurposing an old Android phone as a web server [2020]", 134 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051

"I replaced Google Analytics with a web server running on my phone [2020]", 0 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28306681

No real point on my part here. There's just a lot of colorful discussion here and in sibling threads. I found these to be fascinating reads and they feel relevant. I believe the author was running the server from second link on their daily driver.

Author writes about using Termux as a webserver. Do note Termux's having to target older API versions if anyone is really contemplating the feasibility today.

(Sorry, mobile)

Could just plug it in. The main detractors from making this uneconomical in the US is the lack of consumer infrastructure for upload.

If you had to keep it plugged in, then it wouldn't be very mobile, would it?

I think we are talking about repurposing a small computer previously used as a mobile handset into a server. This is already possible and done with Android and Linux handsets. It is just not as straightforward as using a RPI with a distribution such as Yunohost.org. It's scalability is also very limited, but it kind of fits the low power low cost factors of the RPI.

No, nobody was talking about that. The context was clearly one's personal Android phone (in the article), and "your smartphone" in the original comment (not "an extra/old"). The one you carry with you all the time. The article even admitted you'd have to "carry an extra battery".

Ok, but yes it would still be cool if any of these devices, whatever you want to call them, could be plugged in somewhere and act as a server.

> (not "an extra/old").

So then you concede completely, that anyone talking about these devices, would indeed be correct to say that it is cool to turn these devices into servers.

Great, you agree that there is a usecases for this.

OK. There are P2P mobile based social media services such as https://www.manyver.se/ already running. Although every node is serving/getting messages, I am not sure they can be called servers.

No, I - as the OP - said also "pocket computer" very explicitly. If a 'personal mobile server' would become reality, it's not going to be a smartphone + something else on top.

Is it possible with old iPhones? I have an old one just laying around doing nothing.

> If you introduce super-nodes with good power and constant connectivity, where weaker nodes can post their data to be cached and replicated, you just invent servers again.

No you don’t. Not if the super nodes are almost automatic. The problem with servers is having to manually admin them.

Good points! I know my smartphone works for two days on a small battery because smart engineers did smart efficient stuff to make it a reality. So I agree that smartphones as we know them are not a good fit. Let's now try to imagine a pocket computer that can do the job!

Ancient systems like FidoNet [1] used various tricks to sidestep similar limitations at the times of dialup-only connectivity. This included opportunistic store-and-forward schemes for sending messages, hand-crafted routing between personally acquainted peers, and coordinated connectivity windows known as "zone mail hours".

FidoNet worked pretty well, as long as you did not mind your message to reach a destination within 3-4 hops by tomorrow. Maybe it's the right pace of communication in certain cases. Not tweet-style, but blog-style.

Super-nodes with around-the-clock connectivity also existed, advertised themselves as such, and were a great help.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

I don't really buy that. I run a Syncthing daemon on my Android device and barely notice the difference in battery life. The CPU time that a program like FTP would use in the background seems fairly minimal to me.

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