My server is a phone now | Hacker News Reader

My server is a phone now

seg6.space

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Side comment about the difference between “My server is a phone now” and “My phone is a server now.”

In linguistics, the terms “theme” and “rheme” refer to the status of information in a sentence [1]. The theme of a sentence is something that is known or can be assumed from the context (that is, old information), while the rheme is information that is newly introduced in the sentence, often as a comment on the theme. The tendency in many (most? all?) languages is for the theme to precede the rheme in connected discourse.

Without context, a reader is therefore likely to assume from “my X is a Y now” that X is something the writer had previously and that Y is something new. Because most people have a phone but few have their own servers, I was initially confused by the title “My server is a phone now.” I had to read the article to realize that the word order is in fact appropriate: for the writer, the server is old information (something he has had for a while) while the phone (as a server, at least) is new.

In English, theme and rheme might be inferred not only from the position in a sentence but also from how a noun is marked. Possessives like “my” are generally used before nouns referring to things that are previously known or assumed; the definite article “the” is similar. In contrast, the indefinite article “a” (or “an”) usually marks information being newly introduced, so it is more common with rhemes.

I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for many years. Because the grammatical structure of Japanese sentences is very different from that of English, sentence-by-sentence translation often ends up with paragraphs where the information flow is awkward and unnatural. I gradually learned that I could produce smoother translations by reorganizing my English sentences into an old-to-new information sequence.

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

New understanding, you have added to mine, young padawan.

PS: fascinating insight.

This is why I love Hacker News, so many neat info you don't get anywhere else! Thanks for your comment :)

This cliche of "only on hackernews people say interesting stuff" must die.

You meant, "people say interesting stuff only on hackernews". Theme vs rheme.

Yes but no. What I did is called Fronting.

> Sometimes, particularly in speaking, when we want to focus on something important, we bring it to the front of the clause. This is called ‘fronting’.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/fro...

Thanks to you, "My server is a phone now" becomes much more interesting now as the server is now a perpetual non-physical entity that inhabits a new physical form, the phone.

Isn't there a simpler explanation in that "my server" can refer to a role or to a specific machine?

The author uses "server" as a role. So "my server is a phone now" translates to "the server role in my setup is now played by a phone".

Maybe this is just a rewording of what you said. You clearly know a lot more than me about linguistics.

Yes, I think that’s a rewording of what I said. As you point out, the word “server” in the title refers to a role, not to a particular device. But that role is, for the writer, something that is already known, so it comes first.

This theme-followed-by-rheme is only a tendency, not a hard and fast rule. In casual conversation, people do tend to structure their sentences that way without even thinking about it. In writing or translation, though, a sentence might need to contain a lot of different elements and, in the process of arranging them, a writer might put the rheme before the theme. Readers might think the resulting sentence seems a bit awkward, but they probably won’t be able to pin down the reason. This “My server is a phone now” title was an exception, because (as the comments below show) some people were confused enough to remark on it.

It's like saying "my server is now white", a common thing people would say roughly a hundred years ago.

In that case it would still be more clear to say “my phone is my server now”.

The current title is just a bad English construction. Not a big deal and absolutely forgivable since I don’t expect everyone to know perfect English.

In Esperanto:

Servilo, the tool that serves something.

Servulo, someone who serves something.

Servanto, some agent (in grammatical sense, so very broadly applicable) which serves something.

Servisto, some professional serving something.

That's a big tangential to TFA though, add other noted it suffers from wording ambiguity that don't need any other language to be dispelled. Compare for example "Dæmons dwells on phone now", just as short, far less ambiguity.

Yeah I first read it as he turned his server into a calling device.

Me too.

As someone who just installed FreePBX on his home server, I guess I basically did that.

Regardless it is extremely poor phrasing and would have been easily addressed by using "My phone runs a server now".

It's borderline clickbait, unless the author is an English graduate and assumes all their reader will be too. A phone running a server is not very interesting and has been shared many many times on HN before, while I've not heard of a phone running on a server before (which I why I clicked at all).

Accusing someone of click baiting to excuse your own ignorance. Hawker News?

That's a funny thing to say when even the long explanation I'm answering to does point out the fact that it cannot be reliably determined purely from the title in this case.

Where did you end up on for “gensoku ni”?

I actually think it's just a poor title, "my server runs on a phone now" would be better.

As it is, I expected the server to now have a modem, to be operating as a phone.

that title might be easier to parse, but it's less poetic and less attention grabbing

The goal as a blog author should not be to grab attention and mislead readers into starting your article only to realise it's not what they expected and were interested in.

Why do you think misleading was the goal?

To me it was a clear and a very fitting title.

(But my first language is german, maybe that has some influence)

I doubt it was OP's goal. Commenter I responded to on the other hand said that the original was more 'attention grabbing' than my clarifying amendment, and that's what I said ought not be the goal.

That also elides the distinction between "the server" as a piece of hardware and "the server" as a piece of software, which in an HN context is not insignificant.

Only in as much as "phone" as telephony hardware, "phone" as telephony software, and "phone" as a shortening of "smartphone" in the same way.

The author should have swapped the title with the subtitle: "rooting a CMF Phone 1 to run my personal infrastructure at home".

I wonder if this is a native/non-native English reader situation. I'm the latter and for me the title promised that I will read about a server that now is capable of letting a person call to order a pizza. That was immediate thought.

It would be very interesting to see a poll results on how many of us thought that the article is about a server doing phone stuff and not a phone doing server stuff.

I don't think it is, I'm also the latter and happened to assume the opposite. The article was exactly what I expected from the title.

I mean, turning a server rack into a phone just isn't something that makes any sense, so it didn't seem like a valid option to consider. I've thrown it at a few LLMs now to see what happens and they also make the same assumption with no extra info, that it's a server now being hosted on a phone. That's the statistics talking. It's very unlikely to be the opposite.

Of course it's clear which is more likely in this specific case, but from the semantic structure I read (present tense) it the other way around. It actually struck me as a grammatical error when I first read (past tense) it.

If I said "my water is ice now," one would assume freezing rather than melting.

So in this case one would assume a server became a phone, when actually a phone became a server.

(English is my first language.)

Yes, that’s a great example.

I think most of the time you’d play with the order it would be for comic effect, like someone saying “my dinner is pretzels now” after having too big a snack.

In this case you have enough implicit context to correctly infer the meaning, but the particular sentence construction strongly implies that the server can now make phone calls.

I don't think so either, as a native English speaker, I originally read this as my server now has phone capabilities, not my phone is now being used as a server.

Interesting. I saw the title and read "my 1U rack has been replaced by a phone".

(I then realized that I have a cluster of 3 phone chips I use as my "server". Phone chips are pretty OK.)

flagged as inaccurate

I'm non-native English speaker and for me the title was suggesting what was decribed - phone as a server.

If you asked any native English speaker what “my X is a phone now” meant, I would wager that nearly all would say that it means that X can now make voice calls, like a phone.

my personal assistant is an AI agent now.

Do you think my personal assistant becomes an AI agent or do you think an AI agent is acting as my personal assistant?

In this case there is enough implicit context to infer the correct meaning, but that is not always the case.

However I still think it is phrased poorly as it does initially seem to imply your personal assistant has become an AI agent, but then I have to use additional knowledge I posses (that people can not become AI agents) to correct the interpretation.

I think a better phrasing would be “I now use an AI agent as a personal assistant”. No confusion there. Your phrase can be understood, just like the article title, but it’s not well-written English IMO.

This shows a problem with the English language: the same sentence can be understood in at least two ways: "the server can now work as a phone", or "the phone is now my server". It is to solve this kind of issue that many languages have markers to specify what each noun means in the sentence.

This is nothing specific to English in general. Though English do offer high latitude of introducing ambiguities. For example stacking nominal groups with mere juxtaposition where for example French is more found of prepositions or adjective whose form is distinct from their equivalent noun/verb/adverb.

It's a problem with all natural language. That's why we don't program in English and in programming languages that are formally defined and can never be ambiguous.

This type of problem doesn't happen in all languages. Many languages are more precise than english and will avoid exactly this type of ambiguity.

> will avoid exactly this type of ambiguity.

Sure but they will have other types of ambiguity

It works in Spanish i think... "Mi servidor es un telefono" - As someone switching back and forth between English and Spanish, it often feels like Spanish sentences are "backwards" to English.

I think I’m English the term you’re looking for is an amphiboly. These sentences are not grammatically incorrect, but can be can leave ambiguity about their interpretation.

I think it's awkwardly phrased because it's too ambiguous.

"My car is a Jeep now" is most likely saying "I switched to using a Jeep as my car" because, short of a large merger, it's not likely that the same car changed its brand.

The same server can become a phone and also the identification of my server can be switched to a phone.

It's interesting you gave the perfect example and yet find OPs title awkward.

> "| switched to using a Jeep as my car"

"My server is a phone now" is exactly the same: "I switched to using a phone as my server"

> because, short of a large merger, it's not likely that the same car changed its brand.

I find a server rack becoming a phone that I can carry around and call people equally unlikely. And because of the improbability, it's ruled out of my interpretation.

1. Server becomes phone 2. Phone becomes server

I guess more people find 1 more probable than 2? That's surprising to me and especially on hacker news.

The ambiguity is that a server rack could gain the functionality of a phone, maybe it's about some kind of self hosted Google Voice alternative.

I've been running servers from "phones" for years with no problems

HN comments sometimes try to argue this is impractical or impossible

All of this could’ve been avoided if the author decided a less click-baitey title worked: My server lives in a phone now.

"My phone is a server now"

would've been better

> 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%?

That's what I thought when I read this. It will probably destroy this battery very quickly.

But in other hand, it is probably a pain in the ass to remove the battery and do some workarounds to make sure the phone correctly behaves without it.

Couldn't you just have it charging on a time-regulated supply e.g. smart plug?

> It will probably destroy this battery very quickly.

'Very quickly' seems to be measured in decades from what I see

Most people I know have their laptop docked, either near-permanently at home or taking it between home and a desk with dock (so it's nearly always plugged in when in use)

The 'servers' I've had were all old laptops - yes, with battery (don't have to buy a separate UPS if one is already included). I've now also had two non-server laptops that were plugged into power pretty much all the time. I treated my first laptop perfectly: taking out the battery anytime I'd be in a classroom for several hours and it was already full enough (you know, back when sliding out your battery was possible in the first place), but I'm not noticing any faster degradation on the systems I treat poorly. I'll activate the 80% cap function where it exists (that is, in the latest phones and my work laptop's UEFI config panel), but the evidence of it being helpful has yet to materialize

I have read that studies show that charging to 100% causes degradation and I trust those more than random people's anecdotes (and I'm a random person), but I'm starting to wonder if I've maybe just misunderstood the study results. Maybe it's like how smoking increases your chance for some cancers but you might also be fine in the end. I see people with plenty of much younger and better-treated batteries that can't sustain literally 30 seconds of use whereas mine are reasonably close to the new state (some haven't had many charge cycles, just sat at a stressy high voltage all the time, which was indeed supposed to destroy them), and I don't know how to explain that otherwise

I think laptops have a way to circumvent the battery when plugged and fully charged

Some phones do too, it depends on their power management integrated circuit (PMIC) and driver. Though it's always better to physically disconnect the battery when not in use, as there is always a trickle current otherwise (most "spicy pillows" batteries are due to deep discharge, as far as I know). The best practice is to store batteries disconnected, at 60% capacity). In theory you could build a small circuit to sit in between the phone and battery to protect it, maybe I'll have a go at it.

I had a laptop as a server for a really long time, and I also poked around using a phone for some server things (not as main server) and after some time it was unusable (the whole phone was suffering because wasn't prepared for a battery that fucked).

Anyway, my point is, maybe his phone has some mechanism similar to laptops to prevent this kind of thing, but in the end it's a phone. It's not the intended use for it.

Well, maybe, but could that not also be the chance thing I mentioned? That it greatly increases odds, but a 'great increase' of 1% per decade is still not more than a third of the cases or so. Or it's the bypass charging that a sibling comment mentioned indeed

What you can do, with some extra steps, is have Home Assistant installed (and have a Home Assistant server, I guess!) on the phone and use a smart power switch that's also associated with Home Assistant.

The phone's battery can be reported to Home Assistant, where an automation can be triggered to turn off power to the phone when the battery gets above a certain percentage and turned back on when it goes below.

Not the best solution, but certainly an alternative from messing around with trying to get the phone to work without a battery.

Afaik mobile electronics’ power circuitry is designed so that power goes straight from charging port to the processor, without constantly charging/discharging the battery, once charging is complete. Unless the system suddenly draws a lot of power (more than the charger is supplying) - which is unlikely in a smartphone.

Some phones bypass the battery when plugged in, but not all do. I know it's advertised as a feature of some gaming phones because graphics-intensive gaming is one use case where you'd want to use the phone heavily while plugged in.

Steamdeck lets you set your preferred % and the dock does pass through charging/power, which I love because that combo guarantees the longest possible life for the battery. I turn it back to 100% for flights, otherwise leave it as 80% at all times. Mine is almost 4 years old now but I don’t feel even a hint of battery degredation yet.

I do the same with mine, except that I haven't been on a flight since I got it :)

Even then, some phones that advertise bypass charging are actually using a software-based implementation, and they can still end up with swollen batteries after being plugged in for extended periods.

This is true but lithium-ion batteries degrade even while not being charged or discharged, and this is worse at the extremes of the state of charge (including fully charged), and at higher temperature (and often a plugged in device is on constantly and therefore spends more time at a high temperature than it normally would), so it's still not great for the battery. A lot of devices have a mode where the batter is kept at a lower state of charge if it's been plugged in for a while to try to reduce this.

AFAIK this is rarity in smartphones and most are charged through battery, which is why those few which have it advertise their direct/bypass charging feature

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.

You could throw the phone in an ammo canister, if the wifi AP is close enough. When I was building hobby quadcopters, which requires several ~half-pound batteries that are a chemistry optimized for maximum power density, a lot of guys recommended steel ammo cans for battery storage.

I’m also an ammo-case-for-drone-batteries guy but they aren’t running and don’t generate heat. A phone would cook right?

Depends on how well the canister insulates it. Steel conducts heat fairly well; it'd get hot inside but I'd guess some airflow around the canister would probably keep it from getting hot enough to cook the electronics. (definitely don't take my word for it lol)

Phones are very low power, likely just a slightly warm spot on the can that radiates, conducts, and convects the heat out. You could also use one of those peltier module phone coolers, to ensure the heat gets out of the phone and into the air faster.

in a steady state closed container a peltier cooler will just increase total heat and not help your phone.

That’s seems like a lot of work when a $200 box will solve it all without the need lol

How many phones have you tested this with?

> but it's a lot less annoying to just accept a small risk of a house fire.

Agree! But do get one or two of those "small automatic fire extinguisher" or whatever they are, that you can attach on stuff, for electrical panels and what not, and put right next to it together with a traditional fire alarm, and you're good to go :)

No extinguisher can stop a lithium battery fire.

Putting the phone into a metal box, and the box, onto something not flammable, would help.

Suspend metal box in larger metal box?

> No extinguisher can stop a lithium battery fire.

Maybe eventually everything around it can be so wet/burned out that the battery fire slowly just ends? The room would probably be fucked anyway...

Some newer phones support bypass charging, which powers the phone directly instead of continuously cycling the battery. Mine doesn't support that, unfortunately, so I've limited charging to 80% to reduce battery stress.

That's surprising to me. It's been a standard feature on laptops for 20 years.

Edit: Or I should say, it was 20 years ago. Maybe modern stuff is worse, but my M2 MacBook Air and Framework 13 Intel Core both power on without a battery.

Are you sure that this is not something every single device does? I’ve never heard of a device that continually switches between charging and discharging while powered if the battery is full.

Not OP, but I know that's not mainstream for phones at all. I think only Pixel phones enable it as a normal thing, when you have the 80% charge limit enabled. Sony (since 2020) and Samsung (since 2023) have it, but only when you enable it within some game settings for selected apps. Maybe gaming phones have it because they're plugged in more than others and care about heat. Apple doesn't do it.

"My phone is a server now" - OP's choice is a subtle one.

By saying "my server is now ..." implies a change of server platform to a phone but not where it came from.

Your offering: "my phone is a server now" implies a change of phone usage but does not indicate where the server came from.

The article itself tells all.

> By saying "my server is now ..." implies a change

Except the original title is "my server is a phone now", not "my server is now...".

Without reading the article, the original title made me think it was going to be related to voip or telephony somehow. Not using a phone as a server.

I meant it from the server’s perspective: VPS before, phone now. The article clears up any ambiguity pretty quickly.

To me, "my server is now..." implies there was some server, it used to do server things, but now it has been repurposed to do something else.

When I read the title, I literally thought "wow, I've seen a lot of people make servers out of old unused phones, but this is the first time I've heard someone make a phone out of an old unused server!"

Agreed, a more appropriate title might be “my server now runs on a phone”

A phone is my server now.

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

LiPo batteries will fail over time if left fully charged. If you don't need the battery it's best to keep it somewhere around 40%. If 80% is the only option, that's usually good enough.

The primary failure mode starts when the cells are charged near their maximum voltage and kept there.

I prefer to assume he's lugging a 12U mini relay rack around with him, including a UPS and cellular fallback for networking, so he can run an Android VM and use it as his cell phone.

See also, this atomic clock wristwatch: http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/

It would be nice if servers had a small touch screen, since they cost nothing in comparison.

Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5MA685ApE ?

I thought the article would be about something VoIP-related.

Remove it.

In normal conditions, you use the product while it’s active. But with a server you are not daily checking.

You might have a bug in your changing limit. I think the constant higher temperature could also become an issue.

Hmmh. My Samsung Galaxy S4 doesn't boot w/o battery. Not sure, whether early in the boot process the presence of a battery is tested or whether there just isn't enough juice.

> "My phone is a server now" would've been better

Not really. No sign of a phone. Just a computer — same as what all other servers run on.

"My server runs on a computer with a form factor that is atypical for server workloads" gets a little closer to the heart of the article, but even then it seems the real meat of it is about Android, not the hardware (although that is mentioned too).

How about "My server runs on Android"?

In true HN fashion, a surprising amount of the discussion ended up being about the title.

Turkish is my native language, and its sentence structure is pretty different from English, so that occasionally sneaks into how I phrase things. I can see why “my server runs on a phone now” is less ambiguous.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the accidental linguistics thread :)

I had an advisor really good at calling stuff like that out as "having an eye for the trivial." The advice helped me reframe my personal reading toward substantive engagement, rather than surface-level nitpicks like the order of words in the title.

Great post. I’m impressed with your English skills. Turkish is a very different language, so I can’t imagine it’s easy to pick up English. Anyway, you inspired me to try doing this with one of my old devices. Gonna put that on my September hacking list.

Appreciate the kind words!

Asking out of curiosity, did you use any LLM assistance to write the body of the article? It's not to judge, I just noticed some peculiar language patterns and I was wondering whether that's something from your native language or from AI.

No worries at all, I don’t mind the question. But it could be a mix! My writing process involves bouncing ideas off LLMs about wording and sentence structure whenever I feel like I’ve reached a checkpoint in the writing process.

For a long time, even though I consider myself fluent in English and primarily speak English every day, both at home and at work, I’ve still felt like I’m not quite where I’d like to be in terms of proficiency. That feeling actually kept me from writing until fairly recently, because I was always worried that whatever I put down wouldn’t come across as coherent (or maybe polished?) enough.

I used to write a lot in my native language back in the day, so I think part of that hesitation came from knowing how naturally writing used to come to me and feeling like I couldn’t quite express myself the same way in English. More recently, though, LLMs have helped me with that. I feel much more comfortable putting my thoughts into writing again.

I actually feel like this is such an interesting topic to explore. I’d be curious to somehow experiment on myself and see whether I’ve started sounding like an LLM recently, and if so, whether we might eventually see people converging toward speaking, or even thinking, in the same way. Scary thought honestly.

I personally didn't notice any strong LLM tells in the writing. In fact, I enjoyed the writing style quite a bit. Especially the following sentence near the beginning of the article:

> At that point I had neither a server nor a phone

I don't know why I like it, I just do. Perhaps it is the slightly humorous tone. Anyways, nice article!

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

cve-2026-0047 if the phone is before March 2026

I mean root In android

Postmarket os is required if your device runs android 7 or below due to termux limitations which prevent you from installing packages, or if your android version has missing kernel syscalls that prevent you from running containers without x86 emulation which is slow.

Rooting is required to install postmarketos, and making termux faster and bind to ports on Android. You don't need postmarketos if your android version can run containers on termux with all the required kernel syscalls

To root or install postmarketos you need an unlocked bootloader.

Sorry in the post I meant you need at least android 7 for termux. 6 and below can't install apps.

If you're hosting behind a NAT device, you can just map external port 80/443 to internal port whatever. You can bind any port 1024 or higher.

Termux is only slower without root if you use proot. PRoot provides a limited implementation of chroot that runs unprivileged in userspace, but this also causes it to be pretty slow. If the server software you want to run is available in the Termux repos, you can use that and have it run at full-speed.

Termux works by patching all programs to treat /data/data/com.termux/files/usr as the root directory and /data/data/com.termux/files/home as the home directory. This introduces some compatibility issues, but it doesn't make it any slower.

The Termux project has a great wiki at https://wiki.termux.com/

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.

It only makes sense if we are measuring raw capability per dollar. Once you factor in noise, physical size, idle power, battery etc, I think the calculation changes.

For a home sever that's mostly idle, it is almost like commuting in a pickup truck.

also factoring in spare hardware. most people have more spare phones than PCs.

Modern dell desktops (like 8th gen+) idle around 10W. Raspberry pi isn’t saving much

I’m impressed with that.

I had a Nuc 9 extreme with a 10gb SFP card in it.

It averaged 69w. The Mac Mini I replaced it with uses just under 5w.

A Mini is possible the worst bang for buck. Also, the horror that that is Desktop Docker can’t be over emphasised. I know there are better ways of using Docker on a Mac, but having got something working I can’t face rebuilding it.

But when starting from scratch, it might be better to get an older Mini that is supported by Asahi and run Linux on it.

My home router is a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny with a Core i3-8100T with a dual 10Gbit SFP in it (1x DAC, 1x 10GBase-T) and it idles at 14W, routing 10gbit full bore 24W. I got it for $80

I also have some Fujitsu office machine I picked up for $50 as my "I need to run some random task on a physical linux box" machine with an i5-7500 and it idles at 15W

What's wrong with Docker desktop? Been using it everyday for at least 5 years.

It’s sluggish, it’s incredibly bloated with all the services that Docker (the company) wants to sell you and the UI is badly designed.

OrbStack is my go-to when it comes to running docker on Mac. It also uses macOS native containerization APIs so containers will be a bit more performant than they would (at least use to) be on Docker Desktop.

Another good approach if you’re fine without a GUI or want to bring your own is just ‚brew install docker‘.

I'll check it out. Yes, no UI needed. I run Docker Desktop but I don't think I've used the UI more than on ce.

The main gotcha I encountered with orbstack was with pulling down internally built amd64 images and trying to run them on apple silicon. I just remember constantly running into issues and going back to docker desktop as a result, even if their solution is janky in its own way.

Not much, it's an "I use arch btw" kind of thing but for docker.

Trying to get it to open on startup and start containers in a particular order is a little finicky. But the real hell is trying to get it to start containers after the network shares have connected.

I’ve got it working, but compared to doing it in compose, it’s awful.

Some of those SFP cards can use quite a bit of energy on their own. They're not designed with energy efficiency in mind.

I've got an Optiplex with an i5 and two hard drives and that idles around 12W when idling.

I made calculations and got the same results. Bought low profile and as a server

My server is an extremely quiet Xeon workstation: unlike 1U servers, workstation are typically quiet. The good thing with a Xeon workstation is that it supports ECC RAM only and there are plenty used. For there's no market for used Xeon systems, so you can find stuff like 22-cores / 44-threads CPUs for $25 or something.

Some mod Xeon systems to use regular PC PSU like Be Quiet! ones and Noctua fans, etc. but my HP Z440 workstation is so quiet already I didn't need to.

In my case it's an headless server and is sits between the vacuum cleaner and the cat's food: there are literally only two cables connected to it, the power cable and the ethernet cable.

I can live with the footprint of one tower.

I run many VMs and containers inside those VMs: Git server, pastebin, NAS, containerized/VM-isolated AI agents, etc. but I don't need it to be up 24/7. I basically only need those when I'm working. So electricity usage ain't a big concern to me as it's more like running 8/7.

I don't feel like I'm commuting in a pickup truck: I feel like I have the perfect machine for the task.

Where can you buy a workstation like that for so little?

This is my situation exactly. Got an i5-4570 with 16GB, no GPU, running Unraid with a bunch of containers for Jellyfin, qBittorrent, Crafty Controller (minecraft), HomeAssistant, etc.

I'm using a PCIe expansion card to get double NVMe drives for the cache disk, and then three (up to five) 3.5" spinning 8TB drives for long term.

I tried really hard to get it on 32GB but sadly the motherboard only has two slots and only supports 8GB DDR3 modules. I literally ordered some of the rare late-generation 16GB ones and it refused to boot, with no firmware updates available from the vendor (Advantech, board is an AIMB-274).

> I tried really hard to get it on 32GB but sadly the motherboard only has two slots and only supports 8GB DDR3 modules.

Buy a refurbished Xeon workstation with DDR4 RAM. If you're in the US or China they're basically free and if you're in the EU, they aren't too pricey (like you can definitely find ones for less than 200 EUR). Slap your double NVMe expansion card, your two NVMEs and your 3 3.5" spinning rust in it. If the workstation doesn't come with a Xeon with lots of cores, just buy one on eBay for $25.

I like my little jonsbo N2 case, and really I haven't hit actual perf limits yet, so I'm fine for it to chug along as-is for as long as I can get it to.

Yep. My 2010 server does everything I need incredibly well, and I see no point in retiring it anytime soon.

ASRock H67M-ITX, i3 2.5GHz, 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz, 2TB+4TB SSDs, DVD-RW, in this Mini-ITX Antec case[1].

[1]: https://www.antec.com/product/case/isk300-150

What's the idle draw on that?

I don't have a measured plug on it, but estimate roughly around ~32-38w.

I just bought a refurbished Lenovo k14 with 32gb of ram and Corei7-1165G7 with 500gb for 350$ which I'll use as my 2nd home server.

My first home server is a 2nd hand gaming PC that I bought for 500$ with 32gb and 7700rx video card that I use for GPU based tasks but it's quite audible when it's working so wife and I agreed it has no place in the living room anymore and is being deported to the corner of my office.

You can still find really good bargains for home servers from refurbished good computers, and given how well solved tech reliability is now, it's really not worth buying new.

Second hand SFF office PCs are super good for this. Machines like Lenovo Thinkcentre or Dell Optiplex.

Because there are so many of them (at least in Denmark where I live) they are pretty cheap and it's easy to get one with an I-processor.

My current machine's idle draw is also very low at 5-6w.*

*Based on some quick research it does seem that I was a bit lucky with mine, so I guess it's fair to mention that mileage may vary.

not to mention avoiding all the headaches with android

I mean, it's hard to beat almost free. The phone was being unused, therefore it was free hardware for this project.

Old thin clients can be good deals too. Dell Wyse 5070s are great for basic tasks, especially if you can get the Pentium Silver J5005 models. They take M.2 SATA SSDs and they don't have UEFI whitelists on their M.2 WLAN cards, meaning you can get one of those M.2 A+E key SATA cards and connect a SATA HDD to it. Expect to pay around $40-$50 for a Dell Wyse 5070 with 4GB of RAM and eMMC storage. You can easily add an SSD, and since it takes M.2 SATA SSDs, you can buy lightly used ones relatively inexpensively.

Old Optiplex are also good deals. I bought a Dell Optiplex 5070 MT for $150 for myself and 2 Dell Optiplex 3070 SFF computers for $75 each to replace my mom's aging Windows 7 PC. All 3 computers take DDR4 and M.2 NVMe SSDs and have an Intel i5-9500 CPU that will also run Windows 11 pretty well, if you're into masochism that is.

Nokia went through a phase in around 2006 of seriously believing the future was people liveblogging and serving it over 3G from Symbian based Series 60 devices. This was based on "Apache Raccoon" https://sourceforge.net/projects/raccoon/files/raccoon/PS_1_... which was a port of Apache to Symbian, and a port of Python for scripting, complete with the ability to write multithreaded code (GIL excepted) using Symbian Active Objects.

I so wanna know more about this, I'll be spending a chunk of the afternoon reading on this story.

The future used to be so cool. Having access to Wikipedia and live reporting always on hand was going to make everyone so informed, easier communications were going to make democracy and grassroots organizing flourish... We were all going to have our own server on our pockets...

We were naive, but I sorely miss the tech-optimism that to some extent carried me through uni.

A further example of how stunningly naive this was: they wanted (external NMEA) GPS connected to it (and Bluetooth beacons when indoors, which had to be created for the project) so people could publish their real time location.

I work in a place where we have about 100 phones in a server room that we use for automated testing of mobile apps. A few phones get chucked out every year due to bloated batteries. We’ve even had one or two explosions. We have them well cooled now and in fireproof containers. We try to do some power management like automatically discharging them every once in a while etc…

Is it not worth the effort to take them apart and take the batteries out before you put them into the rack?

This reminded me about the recent Google blog post where they made a server farm out of a bunch of old phones:

"Prior to deployment, smartphones must be processed to remove all but the motherboard, which contains the core compute functionality. Note that the motherboard is responsible for the largest fraction of embodied carbon (approximately 50% based on internal carbon footprinting assessments), so this effort targets the most impactful components."

And they accomplished the author's first goal to run real GNU/Linux on the phones.

https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform...

The new AGI goalpost will be "able to deploy Linux on everyone's old phone with drivers for all the hardware ".

All Android phones run "Linux" - the hard part is running mainline linux

How did they manage to run the phones without the battery? Apparently you need to desolder the BMS from the battery, and connect a power supply to it. And I guess simulate charging via USB and discharging so it doesn't turn off because it thinks it has drawn more than its battery capacity?

It’s Google turning Google Pixel phones into servers, they were able to call in the hardware design team to work out what was essential and how to strip the devices down, and then the firmware team to be able to boot a standard Linux kernel on them. This is a very different situation to most people’s experience of trying to do out of the ordinary things with a phone.

Hahaha I did this with AI last week. It’s confirmed. We have AGI!

Phones won't work without batteries. You need to make some hardware changes for them to keep working, it's not trivial.

A lot of phones nowadays are glued shut, you'll budget for a trained repair tech to do that. They also use the battery as a giant capacitor to absorb spike draws that wall chargers cannot provide, so the modified device will need that capacity as well. Finally, there will be some radio certification ambiguity as to whether it's legal for a legal company to operate.

That said... there are Chinese rackable phone KVM thing, available on Chinese e-commerce sites, intended for social media fraud farms(faking likes, aiding account thefts, sending scam DMs, calls, SMS, etc). Taking them apart should be already common in those scenes. Reportedly those are operating at some scales globally in various third world scam malls - shopping malls by architecture, but operated by gangs and inhabited by scam shops. So it's readily possible, if necessary.

any way to find those rackable phone kvm things? My quick search came up empty. I might get someone interested in that. However, we're a very big European corporation, so "let's use social media fraud farms" and "hire talent from scam malls to build them" might not fly in a meeting :P

  https://chinese.alibaba.com/product-detail/Mobile-Phone-Group-Control-Equipment-Motherboard-1601460564510.html
  https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/For-Samsung-Custom-Packaging-OTG-Memory_1601872798649.html
  https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010070778997.html
  https://aliexpress.com/item/1005012481751631.html
  https://www.tiktok.com/@xbus260430425/video/7671530564876258573
  https://www.tiktok.com/@xbus260430425/video/7663701554905582862
  https://www.instagram.com/reel/DP_UrdhEm8R/

Took me few minutes, but looks like one query that works for these on Alibaba/AliExpress/taobao is "click farming phone". "手机主板服務器"(phone mainboard server) might also work in some places.

I see bunch of multi GPU crypto mining style chassis as well as just USB mass charger styled ones. This is something I just came across randomly so I have no experiences or connections for these, but hope this helps. It's kind of cool looking if it weren't for scams.

edit: note, it's not clear if they come with the phone PCBs or phones are customer supplied. The "boards" mentioned in some of listing seem to imply that it refers to adapter boards for the phones, through subtle wording

At that point why not just one one of those android tv boxes that are basically android phones without the battery and screen?

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

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

I've been saving phones in my drawer for years, waiting to combine them to form a "supercomputer".

Any day now!

The thing I've heard with people who do this "at scale" is to expect the phones to burn out. They're made for pretty bursty activity so if you try to do too much on em continuously they start acting weird real quick

What does "burn out" mean?

Doesn't the CPU throttle if the phone gets too hot?

Or maybe some parts like the eMMC aren't spec'd for things like constant logging?

like legit CPUs etc start failing. There's throttling but ultimately even that....

things might have gotten better though, I last had convos with people who did this maybe 6 years ago at this point.

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.

Love the idea, great work!

Router with fanless gpu for AI load , nvme slot will be game changing

Crazy timing. I did the same thing last week!

I have an old oneplus 6 and all I did was plug it into my computer and told Claude what I want and it just worked.

I even told it to make sure the battery doesn’t charge above 80% to not fry the battery and it couldn’t find the setting so wrote something to make it work.

I feel like this whole thing would have taken a weekend pre AI - instead I did it on a whim and spent about 5 minutes on it and it took less than 2 hours of wall clock time.

I wouldn't view swapping Hetzner for Cloudflare as a gain in freedom.

But then how else would you write your self-congratulating blog post?

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

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 always wondered how actually cheaper a QR menu is, compared for instance to an android tablet you set there or pass to the client so they order.

People immediately see the cost of a tablet, the issues with charging, building the app and updating the data, customers not understanding the interface etc.

Yet, they don't seem to grasp all of these are basically the same for a QR code: you're now maintaining an online service just for your restaurant. People still need to understand your site. You'll be dealing with their browser, extensions, languages etc. And you still need the QR code somewhere on the table, visible, explain that it needs to be scanned (by one person ? everyone ? do they need to keep the tab open ? etc.). These will all be costs, you pay either upfront by hiring experts to make the experience good, or on the go with crappy customer experience, your staff spending more time than needed working around the system and explaining it to your customers, and those not coming back.

There are super cheap and simplistic ways to deal with all of that, and I assume GP has seen many of these.

PS: The weirdest experience I ever had was someone at our table scanning the code, to copy/paste it on the browser on their personal profile (default was work browser). They missed a digit in the url params and ended up opening the order menu of a table at the other side of the restaurant, and just started ordering, then waiting for a pretty long time while the other table was dealing with the mess.

Every system like that I've ever used has three fundamental problems:

1) It's optimized for the restaurant first, and the patrons second or not at all, and it shows.

2) Someone thinks "hey, we could sell ads on this", and now it's even more a piece of garbage. (This is also what happened with all the little kiosk-tablets on the tables at some restaurants. We just set them face-down on their screen and talk to a human.)

3) Most of them never anticipate unexpected problems. They might have an "order X" button, but they often don't even have a "call server" button. And when they do, it often doesn't work, because the other end isn't hooked up to something that gets people's attention.

The much lower-tech and more enjoyable solution I've seen used successfully many many times is a call button on the table. Press the button if you want service. Bonus if it has a "press this other button if you want to be left alone".

Not when I forget my phone in the car.

Having backup tablets on hand is a good hybrid.

Notice that when someone grabs their phone, they're not just grabbing a web browser but also their personal entertainer. Besides chats, many people also have various apps trying to nudge them into engaging with it. I have never been in a restaurant without menu though, I just imagine that I'd end up on HN while contemplating what to pick out of sheer habit and muscle memory

Besides that, there are people who have no smartphone or an empty battery, can't use a smartphone (one of my grandparents can read a menu with a pocket magnifier, but a touchscreen phone is too cumbersome and so they don't know how to use that; another grandparent has memory issues and never learned how to use a smartphone), don't have signal (you need to provide WiFi), have an allergy and need to ask questions or ensure that some ingredient is really taken out, etc. I'm not against the option to order impersonally but a good kitchen communication system would go a lot deeper than slapping wetware with slopware

> ... without having to flag down a server / waiter.

Using QR codes to not having to talk to a human and to "optimize" humans out of the loop in a restaurant sounds like a great scenario for an episode of black mirror.

QR code menus are one the shittiest experience people going to a restaurant to enjoy a meal can have.

> Do you not like this option?

The entire world fucking hates it. It's totally dumbfucktarded.

Sorry to be blunt.

I don't think anyone over 30 around me likes that. At that point it's very close to door dashing but less convenient.

For whatever random reason, all the QR code menus where I live are implemented in a really, really shitty way: unresponsive, with huge latency, making it unnecessarily hard to make a choice. And good luck asking for a modification, like no mashed potatoes please or anything like that.

As a strictly opt-in system, with a corresponding default tip amount reduction of 50% (7.5%/9%/10%), I don’t see any issues :)

> It came back, and lesson learned: Android already has working drivers for every piece of this hardware. [...] Throwing all of that away in pursuit of a more conventional userspace was the wrong trade.

pmOS is a proper port with native Linux drivers, but there’s also Libhybris / Halium which runs Android drivers in a more typical “Linux” userland. Ubuntu Touch uses that, so it could be a good starting point. Sadly, I don’t see CMF Phone 1 in the devices list: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/

It is incredible the amount of gimmicks some folks will go through, even if it was to stay with reuse Android phone story, Java and Kotlin as regular Android app already provide all the juice required to do the job.

You can't bind to ports so you can't run a server without a proxy. Depending on your android version you also can't run containers due to missing kernel syscalls, so you have to use x86 emulation

Here is a secret, you don't need containers for server software, we have been doing it for decades.

Yes there are ways to bind to server ports with official APIs, example can be requested to Fable, Claude, or whoever you feel like it.

What do you mean? Android blocks apps from binding to ports which is what apache httpd does unless you root. I would be asking Claude for an exploit to unlock the bootloader so I can root

Also, you can't install things on termux if you have android 6 or below. You must install postmarketos and thus an unlocked bootloader.

Not if the application has the right permissions on their installation manifest.

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />

Then you need to write the server handling code on a background application thread, with perfectly working server sockets.

This only works on wlan, or local network when using bluethooth, but who wants data modem for a server anyway.

With Gemini's compliment,

    import kotlinx.coroutines.Dispatchers
    import kotlinx.coroutines.withContext
    import java.io.BufferedReader
    import java.io.InputStreamReader
    import java.net.ServerSocket
    import java.net.Socket
    import java.net.SocketException

    class AndroidTcpServer {

        private var serverSocket: ServerSocket? = null
        private var isRunning = false

        // Call this function from a CoroutineScope (e.g., lifecycleScope.launch)
        async suspend fun startServer(port: Int = 8080) {
            withContext(Dispatchers.IO) {
                try {
                    serverSocket = ServerSocket(port)
                    isRunning = true
                    
                    // Loop to continuously accept incoming client connections
                    while (isRunning) {
                        val clientSocket = serverSocket?.accept() // Blocks until a client connects
                        
                        if (clientSocket != null) {
                            // Handle each client connection in a separate background routine
                            handleClient(clientSocket)
                        }
                    }
                } catch (e: SocketException) {
                    // Triggered when stopServer() closes the socket
                    println("Server socket closed: ${e.message}")
                } catch (e: Exception) {
                    e.printStackTrace()
                } finally {
                    stopServer()
                }
            }
        }

        private suspend fun handleClient(socket: Socket) {
            withContext(Dispatchers.IO) {
                try {
                    val reader = BufferedReader(InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()))
                    val outputStream = socket.getOutputStream()

                    // Read incoming text from client
                    val incomingMessage = reader.readLine()
                    println("Received from client: $incomingMessage")

                    // Send a simple response back to the client
                    val response = "Hello from Android Server!\n"
                    outputStream.write(response.toByteArray())
                    outputStream.flush()

                } catch (e: Exception) {
                    e.printStackTrace()
                } finally {
                    // Always close individual client connections
                    socket.close()
                }
            }
        }

        fun stopServer() {
            isRunning = false
            try {
                serverSocket?.close()
            } catch (e: Exception) {
                e.printStackTrace()
            }
        }
    }

As you might imagine by my comment history, I am a big fan of letting Android be Android, with Android native apps, not stuffing GNU/Linux into an APK.

You can bind ports 1024-65535, and if you're in a home setting, you can just configure the port forwarding/DNAT settings on your home router to forward external ports 80/443 to whatever ports you're using internally.

Containers are nice, but they're not strictly necessary. On Google Pixel 6 and newer phones, you can take it a step further and root your phone and run a KVM-accellerated arm64 Linux virtual machine on your phone. There's a port of Limbo PC emulator that includes support for the KVM accelleration, and it works quite well! It even allows you to pass through USB devices to the guest.

So I would need to buy a new separate router and connect it to my ISP's router.

Does your ISP router not allow you forward a port to a different port? I just assumed that was just a basic feature that any router would have. If the ISP router is that bad, it's definitely time to replace the ISP router or put in into bridge mode.

Sorry what do you even mean?

> Java and Kotlin as regular Android app already provide all the juice required to do the job.

To do what job? What job can Java and Kotlin do on a phone to replace a Hetzner VPS?

Last time I checked there are plenty of server software written in those languages.

Well, the author embodies the true spirit of Hacker News. Without people publishing their experiments or learned things, others wouldn’t learn or feel inspired to ~hack things together.

One more reason to explore what it means to develop modern approaches to software development, instead of putting UNIX clones everywhere, basically frozen in time.

I see the 'battery backed' as an issue.

Keeping it plugged in like that is going to harm the battery.

That and the fact that my Xiaomi 12 runs USB 2.0 ....

I'm stuck running stuff on MacBook at night when I don't use it because of that.

Electronic price need to become reasonable again, a 8gb raspberry pi 5 is about 200€ right now. It's absolutely insane.

My pi 4 did cost me 40€ a few years ago.

It's an old phone getting a second life, the health of the battery is probably not a big concern at this stage.

yeah but when the battery fails, you loose your "server".

i'm thinking more about long term.

It's not a concern untill the phone is bloated because of damaged battery. Also it can catch fire!

I'm using my unrooted stock s23u with damaged screen as a server but only to me thru tailscale.

Termux. Proot ubuntu. Serving OWUI and syncthing. Works fine. Had to remove pw protection so runit starts services at reboot. Therefore encrypted at rest any sensitive data

I Ssh in into it with ai harness to make changes. Made me not want to sell it after all.

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.

did you commit or open source your changes to postmarket os? also you can't unlock bootloaders anymore on samsung phones. you will need to find an exploit. https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame

Claude did the changes, I didn't do anything, I think it's was mostly recompiling with flags.

I think you are doing much better with an optiplex 3050 micro and libreboot. Android with it's locked down bootloader and outdated kernels is a dead platform. You are fighting Google's control at every step. Sad, the US used to be all about freedom...

I have similar idea of using my old Xiaomi Mi A1 as a server, but I have never actually done it. The author's first idea and mine was similar, replacing Android with PostmarketOS. And here is the difference, I was not brave enough to actually install PostmarketOS to my phone. Especially after looking at the Postmarket Wiki where not all features for my phone are flagged as supported.

In the end, I abandoned the idea and opted on purchasing an Android TV Box that has been installed with Raspbian for my home server. Sure it may not be as powerful as my phone, but it came with full blown USB that I can use to add any storage I want and it was cheap (today, it was approximately USD 11-12).

If the OS came pre-installed I'd be weary of Chinese call home/ your device being used as a residential proxy for DDOS farms

Correction for my previous comment, it is not Raspbian, but Armbian. The Armbian was not pre-installed from the factory, it was an Android TV Box that some tech-savvy guy in my country reinstalled. And in the end, I reinstall the Armbian in a micro-SD card, so the pre-installed OS was not used at all.

I recently bought a $40 Z Flip 4 on Facebook Marketplace with a broken inner screen. Setup was tough while working half-blind, but once ADB was enabled, scrcpy made the rest easy. It’s easily one of my best purchases yet. It works surprisingly well as a full server and easily replaced the Raspberry Pi running my cloud sync apps. A 512GB microSD card alone would’ve cost double what I paid for the whole phone! My one complaint is that I'm unable to root the phone to optimize performance and set battery limits, but that hasn't held me back from anything I've tried to run so far.

When I read about the browser 'surf', I first thought of the browser from suckless: https://surf.suckless.org/

Just a heads up, proxmox now supports ARM, so with the authors setup, it could potentially run Proxmox along with LXC for containers.

LXC does provide a security boundary, more than Docker but less than a full blown VM.

any guides on transorming an android phone into a proxmox node?

It's only just become available for ARM, so I doubt there's much information out there yet.

Not exactly the same usage but I run a headless Chromium with Puppeteer on a Raspberry Pi 4 at home for some light ("ethical") web scraping (as a residential IP is essential sometimes to bypass Cloudflare).

A real html page maxes the cores easily but it works. Keeping the pages open instead of closing / reopening tabs helps.

For reference I tried running it in a container inside my low end Synology DS223j but any container running, even doing nothing, ruins disk performances, weird bug.

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

“My daily driver is a clown car now.”

If you have a clown car already, know how it works, and it's magically cheaper to drive than regular cars and car prices are high then I don't see the issue with this.

Plus I get to use the Harlequin Occupancy Vehicle lane.

but this way is provocative, it gets the people going

I meant it from the server’s perspective: VPS before, phone now. The article clears up any ambiguity pretty quickly.

If your phone is a Tensor-powered Google Pixel (so a Pixel 6 or newer), you can root it and run a full KVM-accellerated arm64 Linux VM with USB passthrough and SLiRP networking. I've used my Pixel 8 with a USB hub and a Mediatek MT7921AU USB 3.0 WiFi card in monitor mode with kismet for the ultimate mobile wardriving setup.

put an old computer in your closet. ssh through your phone (need a proper ssh client tho; I use a custom ssh client and keyboard, both not in the playstore but It's best for what I do). install GNU Screen. install Claude Code CLI. tell claude about your environment and what you are trying to do. enjoy.

I did the same, and am working on more!

https://far.computer

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

Not having heard of that, either, I looked it up:

> An open source anti-detect browser built for AI agents.

Sounds legit, circumventing the locks people are trying to add to their properties in an attempt to keep costs down and the service available for people that are actually trying to use the service rather than bots roaming around. Really happy for you that you managed to run ten of those. Not a nuisance at all.

It's in the same category as Surf, which is the pain point in the article. It's relevant.

That would be a fair point, but I don't see that in the source. The article's first mention of Surf is a link to a previous article <https://seg6.space/posts/resurrecting-ipad-mini/> where the motivation is mentioned:

> I wanted to turn [the old tablet] into a smooth, distraction free reading device, so I [got root and] transferred a few books with iFile and had exactly what I wanted [...] until the reading workflow left the book. \n\n Reading is not really offline anymore. Finding articles, checking references, downloading PDFs, opening links, and asking an LLM about something confusing all happen on the web. [...] [The ancient Safari engine can't provide] JavaScript, CSS, media, and browser APIs expected by current websites [and Apple didn't allow third-party engines.] [...] Since I was on vacation, this also felt like the perfect pet project to hand to an LLM and see how far it could get. Out of that experiment, Surf was born.

The point seems to have been getting iOS 6 to run a modern browser, which was experimentally built with an LLM, not so much have LLMs roam and masquerade themselves on the web via it

The main difference is that Camoufox doesn't have an iOS 6 client. Surf is built around that client experience: omnibox, tabs, history, uploads/downloads, touch input, and audio/video streaming targeting 60fps. So Camoufox is great for running browser instances on a VPS, but it doesn't really replace what Surf is doing for an old iPad.

Increasingly look towards the viability of this for production applications.

This article may come in handy when we look into it.

Extreme distributed regional servers - a dream come true.

The promise of the fabled lowest single tower latency, blast radius containment and resilient to the teeth has always been where my heart truly lies.

I've wanted to try this with an old phone and OTG storage for a local mysql database for my weather station instead of remote vps

But it still seems too tedious/unreliable and most android devices cannot charge at the same time as using OTG even with special cables, needs kernel support

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.

Just because it's a database doesn't mean it does more write cycles on the flash cells than storing regular files would cause it to. Anytime you change something, it writes either a file, or does an update/insert query which causes a file write. In both cases you've written a few bytes to disk, doesn't really matter what the underlying system is (not majorly anyway, surely one solution will turn out to be some % better than another and cause the average phone's storage chip to last 30 years instead of 40 under some defined typical usage pattern)

You can also just insert an SD card to do the write-heavy operations and swap it out when it wears out (you make backups, right? :D)

Any storage device can die, that's why you have a robust backup system, right? Right...? :)

But the flash storage in a phone is going to be the eMMC variety which typically means a proper controller and TLC NAND. Not as robust probably as a "proper" SSD/NVME, but a lot more durable than most micro SD cards. And it'll have health indicators.

If your phone supports being USB host you can try USB splitter dongle and attach external SSD drive to it.

Also if your phone has SD card slot you can try "industrial" SD cards. They are small in capacity but ideal for write load.

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.

This was something the Nokia N900 was excellent at. It was basically a Linux computer anyway so making it a server wasn't a massive undertaking.

I really like the idea of this!

How hard would it be to combine the power of a couple phones for a server? I'm sure someone has done something like that already, right?

Posted up thread: https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform...

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.

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 PHP and a webserver

> modern, rootable ARM64 phone

which one would people suggest? I got two already, both locked. Google Pixel 3a XL 64GB. Cannot root it, Sinlock. Not possible to install postmarktOS. Xiaomi Redmi Note 8T 64GB. Same thing, some lock, need a SIM card, some proprietary BS.. not possible to root easily.. I really wanted to build a cluster of mobiles, but its hard to find cheap and good mobiles for such experiment... and if i have to pay 500 buckets, i can do better with some Mini PC...

My goal is to reproduce the following experiment https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform...

To whom did you call with your server?

Which has likely crashed, as the link is no longer working

It's working for me.

Sigh, I expected some crazy project like hooking a big Xeon rack to batteries, running Graphite or Android on it and sticking it in a backpack to use as a primary phone. That would have been glorious.

Instead, I got the same old post of someone serving web pages from a mobile phone :(

(not OP). okay here's something that's not the same old post. I don't walk around with it in a backpack though:

I asked Claude to set up Twilio (a phone API), and after setting everything up for it, now I can give my Claude agent instructions in any format where I have access to it (such as our Jira, by email, or when I'm writing a prompt by hand in Claude Code) to call me if it gets stuck or has any questions or needs anything from me, or to call me when it's finished.

so now I sometimes get to relax at home and get a call where Claude tells me that I have a Jira ticket that needs me to answer a question. so I open up Jira, answer the question, and go about my day.

(I also have it call me to remind me about appointments and requires me to press a key to acknowledge it, so that I definitely don't miss the call and confirm that I got it - I did this because I was constantly missing reminders and calendar appointments.)

So, while my server isn't literally a phone, it does call me when it has a question and to remind me about my appointments.

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

Doesn't this depend on the kind of phone and battery?

Keeping fans connected to power 24/7 is a fire hazard, too.

Running electricity through wood, arguably insane.

Dunno, i ran my blog for two years from my old iphone 4. It was fine.

you should drop the battery.. see this project https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform...

Source

You can use a smart plug that turns it on/off. Or even a mechanical outlet timer.

Or set the phone to never charge above 80%

Thta said, keeping it on charger for months will eventually swell its battery, true.

I suggest you to go down this route, but replace Android with postmarketOS and make it a Kubernetes cluster: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/

First thing the article does is explain that they did and it was a wrong choice.

Nothing Claude / Codex can't fix. I'd call this a skill issue tbh

On top of that, pmOS can work with non-mainline Linux, so with the Android kernel, which is somewhat guaranteed to have support for most / all the devices. You shouldn't use it if you care about security though, but that's a different matter

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