I turned an old phone into a NAS | Hacker News Reader

I turned an old phone into a NAS

xda-developers.com

169 pointssimonpure95 comments

Side note: This is an interesting headline for dating a person. My instant/initial thought when I read "I turned an old phone into a NAS" was to picture a rotary phone somehow modded with ethernet and hard drives. "Old phone" to me means a rotary phone. After a few seconds I realized "old phone" to many people now could still mean something that's running Android.

That said, this is really cool. I love clever ways to re-purpose older-but-working phones!

You young whipper-snapper!

Why back in the day, we didn’t have ‘em new-fangled rotary phones. We had to tell the operator who to call!

You can also ask someone to mime answering a phone call. Some people will extend their pinky and thumb, but younger generations will just hold their palm to their ear or position their hand like they're gripping a flat device.

I never understood this, though, because never even with old rotary phones, did we need to position our hand with our pinky and thumb like that

I've thought of it like an approximation of where the functional parts of the phone were. Thumb is the transmitter and the pinky is the receiver.

That's how Inspector Gadget answered his phone.

More seriously, people picking up the receiver of a Western Electric Model 500 would grip the receiver tightly; extending your thumb and pinky from this grip gets you the "pretend phone" hand mime. Otherwise it just looks like you're holding your fist to your ear. People grip a cellphone quite differently, generally with their fingerpads or the middles of their fingers.

Holding ones fist up to their ear, as if holding a rotary phone handset, may come across as overtly aggressive.

Or sexual depending on the angle and tightness of fist.

I don't think it is replicating have position, it is just the convenient way to shape the hand so it (sort of) stretches from mouth to ear.

It is common to cartoons and TV shows so some people will have learned it from there, but I'd guess the mine predates those shows. Maybe it when predates TV being common in people's homes.

Or the very modern pose of holding your smartwatch to your ear during a call, vs. Mr Burns listening if his mechanical watch was still ticking.

In a similar twist of misinterpretation, when you said it "is an interesting headline for dating a person" I was thinking of romantic courtship.

I couldn't figure out what dating had to do with this either.

"hey baby, want to come back to my place and watch a pirated movie off my NAS phone?"

Your usernames add another layer of humor and coincidence.

Dial M for Movies

> In a similar twist of misinterpretation, when you said it "is an interesting headline for dating a person" I was thinking of romantic courtship.

That's exactly how I interpreted their sentence as well.

Because today, people do indeed write headlines and profiles when trying to get a date.

Same

I did so too, and still had to reread and reinterpret the original comment after having seen yours. I didn't think twice about it, because if I would have my first date with someone and they would tell me they had this project running, I'd be immediately interested, knowing I found someone from "my tribe".

Where 'old' = > 2 years

While technically this sounds interesting, using an old phone to install ONE App and call it a NAS is not what I expected.

Additionally, a storage solution (NAS) relying on a single eMMC or microSD neither seems very reliable nor fast enough.

Considering the small size and the lack of connectivity of "an old phone", there are way better solutions out there in my opinion - even if you'd just like to use it as a "vacation device" in a hotel.

I personally use a GL.iNet Beryl with OpenWRT, which is about 50 bucks used, but there is also stuff from FriendlyElec (NanoPI NAS Kit).

Depending on the phone, if the phone has a USB-C, you could definitely turn it into a NAS with an external disk caddy and an ethernet connection (usb-c port extenders do that). That said, it'd definitely be cheaper and better user experience to just use something with Linux on it (like an older NUC, openWRT as you say, or something similar).

A phone is an extremely versatile device (Audio, Camera, Storage, Display, Battery, USB-C), but for some purposes it is just not the right choice.

I use old phones as

  remote
  audio player
  surveilance cam
  book scanner

What I would love to have is an Android KVM device - an old phone capable of remote controlling a PC like PiKVM[1]. Should be possible, but remote display stuff is pretty hard to handle...

1: https://pikvm.org/

I remember a couple of threads where someone would come in and mention how phones make terrible servers because they basically default to overheating and just start failing terribly if you try to leave them on... wonder if people have found ways around this issue.

Would actually be pretty amazing if you could just mount like 5 or 10 garbage phones into a thing and it could smartly give you a super slow but reliable server setup. Reuse!

The biggest issue I've found while trying to do this is a very high rate of battery failure while plugged in 24/7 under load. 4/5 phones I've done this with have become spicy pillows in the 1-2 year timeframe. They were all Samsung or LG devices, so not complete bottom of the barrel garbage batteries either. IME if you need a cheap server, a used enterprise micro pc has a much lower chance of potentially burning your house down, can be found on ebay for literally $30, and can be easily stuffed full of ssds.

FWIW, Samsung batteries explode even if you don't use them as servers, and in fact it was an issue with their batteries being trash (I think I remember it being that they had been contaminated with metal filings, but I might be entirely misremembering the verdict).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfM0GqsIB6c

I wanted to learn some details about that story (I heard about it back then, but never digged deeper).

Your link seems to lead to some kind of shady video clip portal.

Was that intended? If so, is there a textual version as well? Video clips seem to be a poor medium for most kind of actual information transfer.

Did you try direct wiring to bypass the battery?

E.g. https://www.instructables.com/Power-an-Android-Phone-Without...

Nope, and that definitely would have helped, but I bet 99% of people looking to use an old phone as a server aren't going to do all that either.

With most new phones not being designed to have swappable batteries like the S4 anymore, could this be modified by replacing the cells with a capacitor and then powering the phone from USB?

Would be worth an experiment potentially but it’ll depend on where the protection circuitry lives. A modern BMS chip is relatively complicated and will freak out if the attached “battery” is doing this that wouldn’t be safe for a LiPo cell (eg a capacitor will happily drain to 0V but a LiPo drained to 0V has probably been destroyed)

> 4/5 phones I've done this with have become spicy pillows in the 1-2 year timeframe.

In their defense, that kind of usage is not what they've been designed for and tested against.

I just am thinking about how many phones you can find all over the place. And that tiny footprint... just so tempting.

I want to respond with a Beowulf cluster joke.

Then I remembered this isn’t slashdot and it isn’t 2001.

Now I’m reminded of how old I’ve gotten.

Just remember, BSD is dead now.

Slashdot is where I found out about 9/11. I got up one morning and the NY Times (which I usually read first) wasn’t loading. Neither was CNN. After one or two more news sites, I shrugged and went to Slashdot, and that was where I saw the news.

Thanks for the memory lane trip, mate. Yep, we’re old.

I saw a throw away container for old phones in a zoo and couldn’t resist to pull out some old bastards.

Sounds like even more phones are needed, with a control plane that can let them sleep regularly!

I plugged in an old iPhone SE into the Lightning port on a nice speaker and locked the screen to Spotify -- with auto-brightness it worked fantastically.

Until it also turned into a spicy pillow after about a year and a half.

Really wish there were some kind of system preference to run off wired power only and just not charge/discharge the battery at all.

Some older iPhones can be powered by a $30 "battery simulator" used by repair shops, https://youtube.com/watch?v=jTtGwKS7S0c &

DT880 (for specific older iPhone models, there may be other products for newer phones): https://witrigs.com/products/dt880-mobile-phone-current-main...

I've tried but I don't get the spicy pillow reference. Did it catch fire? Or the screen die?

I believe it's a reference to the look of a failed LiPo battery: it puffs up and looks like a pillow, but if you puncture it fire spews forth.

Reddit first came up with the phrase "spicy pillow" to describe that combination.

Which used enterprise micro PC on Ebay for $30 would you recommend? Trying to sort thru the trash and other options.

OP probably refers to Lenovo ThinkCentre mini PCs; they're well made, quite expandable and cheap, but if you can't find any, check out used Chromeboxes. They can be unlocked and reflashed with Coreboot in a single step, which makes them more secure aside allowing the native install of your OS of choice. Hardware quality is usually very good.

More info here: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/

Chromeboxes aside, I've installed various Linux distros on different MiniPCs and the outcome has always been great; the only caveat is to check if your particular model does like to be used without a monitor. In some cases they didn't and refused to boot, but I solved by connecting on the HDMI port one of those cheap "virtual monitor", "dummy monitor", etc. dongles sold to perform this exact function.

Sibling comment has good suggestions. I personally like Dell Optiplex models, e.g. 9020. Looks like right now the best you can do is about 40-45 shipped for a complete one, but I've snagged about six in the last year or two for 20-35. They come and go. Beware of sellers posting the same thing for 100+; they're worth max 50.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml

From the above site I landed on the Dell WYZE 7020 / Zx0Q... Some models of which have 4 cores (also accidentally bought a dual core version), supports 16GB DDR3, are passively cooled without a fan, and cost me about $50 on eBay (add $20 for a 16GB RAM kit to bring the total to $70)

It's about as fast as a Raspberry Pi 4, and has been great for letting me spin up a docker container to play around with a database or a message broker or what have you.

I limited my search to only fanless designs though; if you are fine with fans then I'm sure there are more performant options out there.

What does spicy pillow mean

The battery in the phone blows up from flat to pillow shaped. It’s chemically spicy inside.

I haven't tried this for an always-on phone, but ACCA[0] grants fine-grained control over battery charging behavior. An ideal state of charge would be about 40%, with battery idle mode turned on so the phone draws power directly from USB without using the battery.

Note that this requires root, but you'd probably want root for all but the simplest file server setups anyway.

[0] https://f-droid.org/packages/mattecarra.accapp/

AccA is my first app install (after F-droid I guess) for rooted phones.

It should be a standard feature of all phones to be able to control charge to maximise the useful life of the device if they're not going to make batteries removable.

My guess is that the issue is more related to the constant high temperatures rather than the battery state of charge, which this wouldn't assist with.

Both heat and high state of charge wear the battery faster, but the combination of both is far more destructive than either alone. Keeping the battery at 40% charge will greatly increase its lifespan.

A typical Li-ion cell stored at 60C and 40% charge for one year will still have 75% of its capacity, while storage at 60C and 100% charge will have it down to 60% capacity in three months.

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...

I have 14 year old Google Nexus One/HTC Bravo for nostalgia because it was my first smart phone. It can no longer connect to the Play Store and is currently not usable although it's perfectly capable. I struggled to find a good rom and easy install process for it. I would love to install LibreOS, PostmarketOS or something like that on it. Any recommendations?

I went down this road and your best bet is an old build of CM, nothing modern will work and even then you need to do funky things with the internal storage (Blackrose IIRC).

My recommendation is flash it back to stock 2.3 (I think that's what it shipped with) and enjoy the nostalgia. Oh and get one of those charging docs while they're still on ebay.

What's CM? CyanogenMod?

pmOS has a device page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_(htc-bravo)

You'll need to tweak the old code base that was tested, though, as armhf is being dropped by many distros, yet that was the default for many devices from around that generation. I don't think the process will break much, but it deviates from that standard install process.

I always get a kick out of these projects because they really do challenge the user to start at a disadvantage to get value out of things like this. Almost absurdly so...

I guess it's only a matter of time before someone posts how they started a billion dollar business on a IBM PS/2 running OS/2 with a token ring card interfaced to the internet.

This is a cool idea.

Apparently USB-C hubs work on Android. This _greatly_ increases the possibilities..

* Wired Ethernet

* Additional attached storage

* Z-Wave / Zigbee controllers for HomeAssistant or HomeSeer

What else could you do with one?

For some reason, I really like cheese.

FWIW, usb-c hubs work on usb-c port iOS devices too.

I dont think there would be software drivers to run Zigbee/Zwave USB controllers over usb on android, even rooted...

Who are the phone/tablet manufacturers that are friendliest to rooting or installing open-source Android clones? It's a pain to do that on my Samsung Galaxy devices...

I'm looking to buy a (new) 10'' tablet for that purpose.

Not Android, but have a look at Librem 11 tablet.

Google Pixel is one of the easiest. Usually carries a lot of dev support even after Google themselves EOLs it.

Google (Pixel Tablet in your case).

I've done (sorta) similar by using syncthing on an old android phone.

It's worked pretty well. of course it just syncs a folder between my devices, but seeing as my desktop and laptop both have to be on, and my desktop is offline, when i was out... i couldn't really sync properly.

so i got the middleman, my old samsung phone, to sync to. it can be turned on all the time, connected to my wifi at home and make sure i always have a place to sync my data to, regardless of what computer i'm using.

I ran into the same problem with syntthing. Instead or setting up a phone at home all the time I setup a docker container on a small VPS I use for other things. Rclone mount of my hetzer nextcloud instance and syncthing together had things running in no time.

It's not ideal to use webdav for the mount but it hasn't had any problems.

You can do this sort of thing easily with an old Chromebook as well. You can re-flash the BIOS from https://mrchromebox.tech, and then install a standard Linux distro on it. You can use an SD card or USB drive for additional storage.

Look around and see what you've got laying around!

As long as it's not an ARM Chromebook, yes. (I think due to ARM just being difficult to work with in general rather than malicious behavior from Google?)

Also note that you'll most likely have to open it up and unscrew the firmware protection screw. It's kind of annoying but it's not difficult and at least it's not iPhone-style "impossible".

Yes. The ARM Chromebooks suffer from long term support issues just like phones. Qualcomm and the other chip vendors will only support a given chip for a few years, and then that's it.

For x86-64, the peripherals are mostly standard, with the sometimes exception of suspend / resume support. So a regular Linux distro will often just work with little tweaking required.

I really want to do something similar, but I have a problem: I need to always have my screen on to be able to connect to the phone on localhost:{port} as I regularly needs to talk on the phone.

In addition to not always needing to have the screen on, it would be good if I could schedule some "extra" battery saving during night when it is not needed.

If it is possible to give only one app possibility to use the internet it would also be good, now I have not bothered to delete all junk apps, and I guess they also waste a lot of energy.

Right now I have seven android phones awake 24/7 with their screen on (dimmed), but I am a bit afraid of fire / battery exploding.

Appreciate any advice on this!

My devices: Samsung Galaxy A41 64GB Samsung Galaxy A14 64GB

if you use Termux to host your service, then you can "Acquire wakelock" to keep it available with the screen off. That's an action-button attached to the Termux notification, and I believe also the main reason Termux has a notification (to trick android into not background-killing it).

I have some quickstart notes here: https://ocv.me/termux/

From experience (not with Termux but persistent services in general) this partially works. The device will really throttle the CPU / network when the screen is off.

This means that your HTTP request instead of taking <200ms will now take 5s.

Or at least, this is my experience with a custom app I wrote for Android 13+ running on a Xiaomi device (veux).

As soon as you turn on the screen (no need to unlock the device), the web server is immediately responsive as it should be

That's curious; maybe this is device/distro-specific? I've had good experience using this approach to transfer files to both my tablet (Samsung s2, lineage) and phone (pixel7, grapheneos).

Or maybe Termux is pulling some additional tricks to avoid this issue?

It could be that my device is heavily throttling for saving battery: the device battery (even with this long-running service) lasts multiple weeks on a single charge.

Maybe it'd be better if you root the phone first, but I'd be hesitant to set up something like this on a system that is administrated remotely by others. Google, the phone manufacturer, and your carrier can make changes to your device at any time without your consent or without any notice to you. Even without a sim card, this could enable them to access/delete/modify your files, add new files, or make changes that break your server or introduce vulnerabilities.

There might be some way to make this safer, but it just seems like a bad idea to set up servers on devices that you don't control and which multiple third parties have privileged access to.

Once I put an old Galaxy S3 in a plastic box to protect it from the environment and with a small solar panel on top to power it. I compiled Cuberite and run a small Minecraft server on it dor a while. It was a funny litte project.

decent phone from past 5 years are excellent candidates for stuff like this, but i personally did not find much use besides basic stuff like an FTP server.

for content, i had a budget android phone whose battery swole within a year of use. opening it without proper tools to remove the battery was a chore for somebody as incompetent as me. but after that, trying to make it set-and-forget like a raspberry pi was a challenge and a half.

you'd like the phone to start by itself when it loses and regains power from a wall adaptor. you'd also like the server/app to auto-launch on boot. these things are unfortunately not a given and the defragmented nature of android ecosystem makes it like a difficult endeavor for those without a lot of determination and free time.

using termux seem to alleviate a lot of these issues but it hasn't personally worked for me when i last tried. but for light loads, this is something i hope becomes dumb-easy in the future. just docker with launch on boot would change the game for me.

"This can also serve as a pretty decent backup system, and if you port forward the device you're connecting to, you can even allow it access to the wider internet so that you can access your files on the go. While I wouldn't recommend it for security reasons, the point is that it's a fairly robust method that can actually give you pretty decent results in a pinch for quick backups."

No, no, no.

Tailscale is easier than port forwarding, and more secure, and has an Android app.

Great! I am so interested in utilizing idle phones to something useful. Does anyone have a list of those fun things/projects that you can use for your old phones?

Reason why I carry two phones. Three terabytes of storage between them. Instant laptop backups with Syncthing and local wifi network.

Not much of a NAS

> For this basic project it was just internal storage over WLAN

Maybe someone can figure out how to access a USB-C dock and have drives attached.

There are so many old devices out there, I love to see examples of people reusing them. Well done

Sorry, but is there are any alternative links for this?

I'm getting `ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR` when I click the link.

On a similar note "Hey would you consent to us sharing your information with 1574 partners?" and no easy "Fuck off" button (I mean reader mode works). How do you as a publisher not see the 1574 partners and think that just maybe this isn't what we wanted?

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