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Show HN: GitClaw – An AI assistant that runs in GitHub Actions

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10•sawyerjhood•1d ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

How to repurpose your old phone into a web server

https://far.computer/how-to/
358•louismerlin•2mo ago
Related ongoing thread: This blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46049981

Comments

agentifysh•2mo ago
so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that?

ive been looking to build and serve my own servers and i have been considering to use old android phones to outright racks but the part I am still struggling to figure out is how to serve it publicly without ISP catching on as they require business plans for that and its not cheap

1bpp•2mo ago
A Wireguard tunnel via a free tier or dirt cheap VPS, or a VPN provider that lets you forward ports like Proton
agentifysh•2mo ago
but can't the ISP still see something is up if there is traffic 24/7
srean•2mo ago
Don't ISP's just charge per caps on ingress and egress volume?

From your comments it is clear that they don't. Super infuriating. Why should they care what I do with ingress and outgress that I paid for, as long as I am not hurting them.

Nextgrid•2mo ago
His comments are based on fear-mongering he read somewhere or an overly-literal interpretation of terms and conditions written to cover the ISP's ass in every theoretical situation possible.

ISPs who enforce data caps already priced it in and technically have an incentive for you to exceed your cap as fast as possible so you pay to increase said cap (they can however still slow down your traffic as they wish, to ensure sufficient capacity for everyone).

ISPs who don't enforce a cap actually still internally enforce a reasonable cap of several terabytes at their discretion. And of course, they can and will use traffic shaping to ensure the integrity of their network so your usage doesn't affect others. If you exceed that soft cap consistently several months in a row they may get in touch, but other than that you're fine.

TLDR: host your server and enjoy. When you get to the scale of the next YouTube, then you have to worry.

lelandbatey•2mo ago
Yes, though even though they can see that, as long as it's encrypted they can't know for sure, so as long as you don't cause problems they won't care at all that you're using it for something. In all my years I've never had an ISP complain about constant encrypted traffic, though some ISPs do have general data caps like Comcast.
Nextgrid•2mo ago
Amount of traffic is what matters. Are you saturating your pipe 24/7 for an entire month? Sure, you may have problems. But you'd have the same problems if you were torrenting (let's assume legal torrents here, I am not talking about copyright) or hosting a mega LAN party with hundreds of people streaming their games all at once.

Otherwise, no worries.

Marsymars•2mo ago
Would use less bandwidth than wi-fi cameras that are uploading 24/7.
rlupi•2mo ago
A CloudFlare tunnel?

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...

Although, you may also go with a 5$ virtual host (e.g. Linode Nanode 1 GB) and wireguard to build your own tunnel (or just the 5$ virtual host to run your server)

agentifysh•2mo ago
i see so just run cf tunnel and ISP wouldn't be able to see I am hosting web apps? what if I am streaming large files (not torrent)? couldn't they see the bandwidths being consumed and then tell me to upgrade to business ?
eptcyka•2mo ago
What kind of an ISP prohibits self-hosting?
flockonus•2mo ago
Heavily depends on the contract with your ISP, I'm not aware of anything saying you can't use your uplink "commercially" - how one would even define and monitor that?
lelandbatey•2mo ago
Yes, an ISP could see that you're using a lot of traffic. But if the traffic is encrypted, they can't be sure what you're doing. Are you a personal user? Or are you a business? How would they know if it's all encrypted?

As for the volume of traffic you're sending, you need to read the terms of your ISP contract, at least a little. Your ISP could have volume limits (e.g. only 5TB of traffic per month), and if you reach those limits, they could temporarily suspend service. But if they can't see what you're doing, and you're within the technical and contractual limits of your service agreement, and you're not causing problems for them, then an ISP is not going to care what you do.

Gabrys1•2mo ago
at this point you don't need the phone :D
shevy-java•2mo ago
It used to be easier to get a web server up and running in the past. I remember the 1990s fondly.

Not sure what changed, but things got more complex - and more expensive, too.

teo_zero•2mo ago
> Not sure what changed

IP4 address exhaustion.

Nextgrid•2mo ago
> don't ISPs detect these and ban

No. No ISP who desperately tries to grow marketshare at all costs and lock their customers into a year-long contract will intentionally ban users. I'm not even sure where this misconception comes from, it's not like ISPs led a massive PR campaign warning people of the dangers of running a server.

The only way you will get banned is if you cause disproportionate strain on their network, which means you'd need to exceed the usage of the typical gamer (downloading games worth hundreds of gigs regularly), streamer (streaming 4k video for hours at a time), cloud backup customer (uploading gigabytes regularly), Windows user (in its default configuration Windows can use P2P to share updates), torrenter (sustained full-duplex bandwidth usage), and unlucky idiot with a compromised device spewing DoS traffic at line-rate.

Saturate the pipe consistently for several days by hosting video? Yeah sure you could get a warning and eventually disconnected, assuming they don't already have traffic shaping solutions in place to just silently throttle you to an acceptable level and leave it up to you to move your homebrew YouTube clone elsewhere when you realize it's too slow.

Hosting a website which will have a few mbps worth of traffic with the occasional spike? That's a rounding error compared to your normal legitimate usage, so totally fine.

The reason most consumer ISPs have a clause against running servers (not even defining what counts as a server) is to preempt a potential business starting a data center off a collection of consumer connections and then bitching about it or demanding compensation when it goes down or they get cut off. Nobody cares about a technical user playing around and hosting a blog at home.

lelandbatey•2mo ago
ISPs don't care, actually. They care about operational problems, but you serving a constant stream of web traffic is probably not going to matter to them; web traffic for even a pretty successful blog is going to be a tiny volume compared to you streaming 4k movies from Netflix.

ISPs will have rules (maximum data volume per month) and restrictions (ISP equipment auto-drops all sending/receiving packets on port 25, 80, 443, or 456), but within those limits the ISPs do not care as long as you cause no problems for them.

Also, one of the easiest ways to expose e.g. port 80 of your in-house server is to just have your local server do an SSH port-forward to a remote server like a cheap VPS. Note that by default it'll bind to a localhost port on the remote, so on the remote you'd need to have an HTTP server reverse proxying to the remote localhost:8080, or you need to enable `GatewayPorts: yes` in sshd on the remote. Assuming you turn on GatewayPorts on remote.example.com, here's how you could expose port 80 of localhost:

    # Run this on in-your-house-computer to allow folks on public internet to visit
    # remote.example.com:80 but have the traffic served by in-your-house-computer:80
    ssh -R :80:localhost:80 username@remote.example.com
You can make the above connection permanent by setting up `autossh` on in-your-house-computer.
euroderf•2mo ago
Would this involve "the usual" dangers of someone hacking the in-your-house server ?
lelandbatey•2mo ago
Yes, with asterisks. If you're serving static files from your house, the risk of having your server taken over is incredibly low. If you're hosting Wordpress on your home server, that risk spikes massively. So make sure you understand what is and is not dangerous, and of course, only expose the "low risk parts" to the outside world.
hn_acc1•2mo ago
If you're already paying someone monthly to "forward" ports, why not just pay for a blog somewhere? Way more secure.
lelandbatey•2mo ago
Cause the server in your house is a lot cheaper to upgrade with more RAM/storage than a VPS. By using a VPS as just a way to make traffic available, you can choose an extremely cheap VPS. It's pretty easy to find places that'll charge you $2 USD/month for a tiny VPS with 1TB monthly data transfer allowances; for $5 you can get unlimited data transfer. There's tons of good deals.
edbaskerville•2mo ago
Other folks have given general answers, but I'm wondering, what ISP do you have, and where?

(I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not shutting down anybody's servers.)

prmoustache•2mo ago
Why would your ISP ban you?
whynotmaybe•2mo ago
Many ISP don't care.

Some may block port 80 and 443 "For Security", but you can sometimes contact the support and they'll open it, even if you're not a business.

I have a webserver running at home and use the free dynamic dns from noip.com.

jeroenhd•2mo ago
> don't ISPs detect these and ban

No? I mean, I'm sure there are ISPs out there that do it, but that's a ridiculous thing to do.

louismerlin•2mo ago
In my experience (in Germany and Switzerland) ISPs don’t care, but they will rotate everybody’s IP once or twice a year.

Friends from other countries, India for example, have had different experiences though, where IPs were on a much more frequent rotation and required scripted solutions.

clueless•2mo ago
Title should be updated to include "unused android phone"
mceachen•2mo ago
"unused android phone with unlocked bootloader that is supported by postmarkOS"

(or maybe be able to use recovery zip that requires effort after every reboot)

shevy-java•2mo ago
Nothing beats my toaster serving my webpages.
iberator•2mo ago
Of course it runs NetBSD
a96•2mo ago
More an exception than a rule these days, sadly.

Though they might still have an edge on toasters.

misiek08•2mo ago
I have wireguard and basic home automation things running as an experiment on vacuum cleaner. Its app was deadly slow, so having 2 cores and some memory to spare he became his own savior, with Valetudo included.
dinkleberg•2mo ago
This sounds like a fun project. A perfect use for an old android phone sitting in the junk drawer.
_whiteCaps_•2mo ago
For some reason, I never buy phones that work with postmarketOS :( And I find phone naming confusing, it's difficult to find a used one locally to play with. Is it a Moto Play 2018 or a Play 2020? Trying to get that information from someone on Facebook marketplace is like pulling teeth.
sexeriy237•2mo ago
Ebay bro, play 2020 was $25 last time i got one. dont mess with fb sellers
ssl-3•2mo ago
That makes sense. Most phone users aren't technical. Like -- at all.

If you can think about how deep into technicalities the most average person you know gets, then you can also understand that ~half of everyone is even less technical than that.

There's nothing wrong with this. That's just the way that it is. (We can accept this or be frustrated. Acceptance is more useful.)

As a workaround, I find that searching by part number provides a good filter.

Maybe I want a very particular Moto G Power to use for whatever. I don't search for any permutation of "Motorola G Power" at all, because that description doesn't help me.

Instead, I just find the part number (maybe something like "XT2041-7") and search for that instead.

This excludes a lot of listings straight away, and that's fine: I don't want to stumble through listings from people who don't know what they have. I only want to buy what I want to buy, and what I want is an XT2041-7.

officeplant•2mo ago
All my old phones used to become BOINC nodes doing WorldCommunityGrid or seti@home, at least until we got to the point where you couldn't run the phone without a battery anymore. Came home to one too many spicy pillow'd phones even keeping them in a cool area with a rigged up fan blowing on them.
ChrisbyMe•2mo ago
Interesting, I wonder if using a regular sff pc fan might work if you don't need the touchscreen.

Just thermal paste to the battery hah

officeplant•2mo ago
I do Wigle wardriving with a dedicated cheap phone these days. (Moto G Stylus 2023)

In order to prevent issues this time around I've preemptively removed the back of the phone, and the camera modules so I can have a nice flat phone. Then I bought a heatsink nearly the same size as the phone itself. I've got thermal pads on the SoC which sits lower than the battery and the heatsink itself had thermal adhesive on it pre-applied which is sticking to the battery/phone frame holding it to the phone. No more phone overheating worries and if the battery goes pillowy it should just pop the heatsink up instead of warping the whole phone.

867-5309•2mo ago
hardcore Wigler right there :)
ChrisbyMe•2mo ago
That's a cool setup.

I've always wanted to get into wardriving but I've never had an opportunity.

is this something you have to do for work or is there a network of wardrivers out there?

I live in NYC so it'd probably be closer to warwalking, but still could be fun.

officeplant•2mo ago
Just something I've been doing for fun since the late 90's. Started off logging things by hand while my dad drove us around town looking for open wifi to use when doing field work. Later progressed to using a laptop + gps + wifi card going into an amplifier and external antenna on the van in the 2000s. That was when software started to allow for automatic logging of wifi with GPS coords.

There has definitely been a community of folks doing it even longer. See the Wigle[1] website for more, including leaderboards and stats. Some people use the data for various reasons, I do it to help track law enforcement via bluetooth & wifi mac addresses.

Warwalking is also a thing! (or riding for bikes) You can often get much better results when walking because you have a longer time to catch all the access points.

You don't really need to modify your phone either, my dedicated phone lives on the dash of my van when I'm using it so the extra cooling helps. But if you don't want to warm up your phone or drain the battery by disabling Wifi scan throttling there are also dedicated devices people are building just for war driving using esp32, etc.

[1]https://wigle.net/

jjice•2mo ago
The thing that holds me back from this is always the battery. I want to have my battery removed so that it doesn't eventually become a time bomb, but it's a pain on modern phones and I'm not even sure if they boot without. The mobile hardware reuse space can suck for hobbyists.
ActorNightly•2mo ago
Most phones can have battery removed somewhat destructively, but without affecting the rest of the phone.

Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely - the battery management on board will keep it in a state where its a constant charge which means the chemistry will be stable.

jprd•2mo ago
I'm not educated enough in this area to have any expertise, however, in my personal experience leaving a lithium-ion battery plugged all the time results in scary semi-exploded batteries that also stop working.

Would you say this is a chemistry/QA problem? Have there been advances in battery / controller technology that achieves the above?

fao_•2mo ago
Yeah I was about to say the same thing! I leave my steam deck plugged in all the time (it is my main computer) and the battery still popped (valve replaced it for free ofc)
kqr•2mo ago
How uh, does one find out about battery problems? I almost exclusively use laptops, and I tend to leave them plugged in most of the time. I don't want a sudden lithium-ion battery fire. Can I detect ahead of time that things are going bad?

(My current machine is a Thinkpad P52 if it matters, but I also use older Macbooks and newer Thinkpads and older Dell machines this way, although they're plugged in less often these days.)

mkesper•2mo ago
1. Improve longevity by charging Li-Ion only up to 85% of marketed capacity (can be configured at least on Thinkpads).

2. Open up the laptop and check if battery is swollen. After about 10 years, it's also a good idea to replace the CMOS battery before leaking.

3. Without opening, sometimes keys/trackpads don't work anymore as expected. This might be due to swollen battery packs (we had several Dells where this happened).

fainpul•2mo ago
With old MacBooks, the bottom bulges out and you notice because it doesn't sit on the four rubber feet anymore but on one central point – it wobbles and you can spin it around.
munk-a•2mo ago
There were several generalizations in that statement that align with my similar fears to the OP. Most firmware should minimize the charge cycling, most batteries should be stable at constant charge... most isn't great for something that I want to sit in the corner undisturbed for a decade just chugging along - I have a few old desktops I use whenever I need a stand alone server or to host something web-live for a while. They'll eventually have hardware failures, but I have a lot more confidence that when they fail it won't be dramatic or destructive - ditto with old laptops, the serviceability expectations are much higher than phones so I have yet to meet a laptop I can't pop open and just pull the battery out of to run on AC alone - in the case of a power failure the UPS can't cover I'd rather the machine just power off rather than needing to deal with the possibility of dramatic failure.

I think if you're considering re-harvesting old devices to use for hosting and get far enough down your list to get to phones then you've likely got enough constant maintenance costs in overseeing things that the additional worry of fire risk just isn't worth it.

mkesper•2mo ago
Every old hardware needing a fan is also a silent fire risk.
zamadatix•2mo ago
A fire risk? I think it'd be exceptionally rare for that kind of thing to lead to a fire instead of just dead parts (assuming no overtemperature protections). Even people with the 600 w melting GPU cables don't end up with an actual fire.

Batteries, however, are absolute hellfire when they go wrong (because of chemistry - not just the temperature).

scoot•2mo ago
What makes your UPS any less of a fire timebomb?
gruez•2mo ago
It uses lead-acid batteries, for one.
munk-a•2mo ago
My UPS is a single device that I have accepted the cost of maintaining and require for my daily use computer - it has to be regularly replaced because the nature of UPSes is a very limited and usually well documented shelf-life.
hn_acc1•2mo ago
Depends on your phone. Just has to replace the battery on a generally always-plugged in Moto (at least after a certain age). Battery had pillowed out. It's acting as our "landline" with a link2cell on some old DECT handsets.
mcny•2mo ago
if the power resets, the phone will boitloop without a battery?
smeej•2mo ago
Of the six old Android phones I have around, two of them I don't dare turn on due to swollen batteries. I guess it depends how old the devices are whether this was a real risk, but I won't leave devices plugged in anymore for this reason.
crazygringo•2mo ago
> Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely

What is your source on this?

I've replaced the battery in always-plugged-in iPhone 3 times over 10 years because it was expanding into a spicy pillow.

I too want a way to run phones directly off of USB power, without a battery present.

jvanderbot•2mo ago
Go to ifixit.com, look up your phone's battery replacement steps, stop half way through :)
crazygringo•2mo ago
Yeah the first two times Apple did it for me. Then Apple stopped supporting battery replacements on a phone that old, so I ordered a battery replacement kit on Amazon and did it myself, with ifixit.com's assistance.

Never again. I was genuinely shocked the thing turned on once I closed it up. It's one thing to have a conceptual understanding of how tiny the components inside a phone are. It's another thing to actually be trying to seat a plug into a socket with tweezers and just have no idea how you're supposed to tell if it's fully inserted or not.

jvanderbot•2mo ago
I agree. But for removing batteries, could not be easier. The ifixit guides are especially good because they warn you of the stuff you could never anticipate when opening glued on cases.
akoboldfrying•2mo ago
> I was genuinely shocked

Could have been worse -- the sentence could have ended right there...

aziaziazi•2mo ago
Place the "server" into a shoebox. Place another shoebox on top, filled with sand. Tape together and hide behind a furniture.
n4bz0r•2mo ago
So the phone effectively becomes a 4U rack server that's probably not much of a fire hazard. We'll tuck it away behind some wood for extra safety. Never liked sleeping with my eyes shut anyway!
xgulfie•2mo ago
Then put that in a garage at least 50ft away from your home
faidit•2mo ago
Next, fully encase the garage in concrete. Surround it with a ring of jagged concentric spikes and skull symbols to warn future archaeologists.
6510•2mo ago
Red Magic can be set to not use the battery when the power cable is plugged in. (it is to avoid heating issues and not degrade the battery)
jeroenhd•2mo ago
In theory, you can replace the battery with a chunky enough capacitor (to get past the power-on surge) and a power source at the right voltage attached right where the battery would go. The soldering points are way too tiny for my amateur soldering skills, though.
volumo•2mo ago
Check out this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM
yaky•2mo ago
You could try to fake a battery instead: https://yaky.dev/2022-09-06-smartphone-without-battery/

(This is for a removable battery, but should be close for built-in ones too, I suppose)

4k93n2•2mo ago
hopefully "bypass charging" becomes more of a thing in the future. a few of the latest pixel phones use it but the only other time ive seen it is on tablets aimed at gaming
leobg•2mo ago
> I grabbed a few power point timer switches, and set them to only over up the charger for a hour a day. Never had another battery puffing failure - at last not in the next 2 or 3 years before I left.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021233

GTP•2mo ago
They don't boot without it, but you can make it think that there's a battery by connecting power directly to the battery pins [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM&pp=ygUYZ3JlYXRzY...

ActorNightly•2mo ago
Don't even need postmarketOS.

Simple root, with a custom degoogled rom, and termux is all you need.

codethief•2mo ago
Can't you just run a Linux VM on Android these days?
zoobab•2mo ago
"Simple root"

You don't need root if you webserver is listening on a port over 1024.

Termux plus some webserver like nginx is all you need.

Now to make it reboot resistant is another story.

hatmanstack•2mo ago
Hell, even simpler. Termux + Caddy + cloudflared with a domain you own. Serving in 15 min.
tonetheman•2mo ago
As others have mentioned you have to watch the battery if you do this for real.

The battery will swell and explode if you run 24x7 on a phone.

qubex•2mo ago
Call out to World Wide Web (no affiliation) that sets up a web server on an iOS/iPadOS (€9.99 for PRO, https://apps.apple.com/it/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id16230068...)
denysvitali•2mo ago
Should be merged with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027554
retrac•2mo ago
If the device can run PostmarketOS with a mainstream kernel, then it can run any Linux distribution. (I put Arch ARM on such devices, since I like that distro.)

That's the big hurdle though - mainstream kernel support.

For most devices, even if they can be rooted and jailbroken, you're stuck with the kernel they come with. Doesn't have a new feature you need? A horrible security flaw in the network stack? You're out of luck. Most "repurpose your old phone" approaches have this problem. You can make it a server but you wouldn't want to expose it to the public Internet.

norman784•2mo ago
Is Arch ARM officially supported by the same team? If not, what might be the reason?
retrac•2mo ago
x86_64 is the only official Arch Linux. All other ports are unofficial. They are community projects where many of the members are the same as the main Arch Linux.

I think it's basically for the same reason as why they dropped 32-bit x86 support about 8 years ago. Not enough users. (That resulted in the unofficial Arch Linux 32 to maintain support.)

throwaway1389z•2mo ago
Arch is working to officially support ARM and non x86_64 archs.

https://rfc.archlinux.page/0032-arch-linux-ports/

embedding-shape•2mo ago
That RFC says "New ports are added by proposing them in an RFC. At least two package maintainers have to lead a port to ensure it will be developed longer term." but I'm not finding any RFC for ARM support, so can one say work is really officially happening on ARM?
rovr138•2mo ago
The first step is setting up the project to allow other ports. That it can be done, what it will require, etc.

Once that’s done, then the ports can be submitted.

Look at the maintainers and contributors on the unofficial arm port. Orce this RFC gets accepted, the arm port can propose and figure out how to merge things together.

embedding-shape•2mo ago
Yeah, that sounds right to me, and sounds like you're agreeing with me that it isn't yet an official effort, as the RFC hasn't yet been merged, in contrast to what parent claimed.
Muromec•2mo ago
I think the reason is they don't want to become debian where deciding anything takes foverever. Another architecture is a liability, so it lives in another "project" that official arch is not committed to.

I write this from arch on arm (orange pi) thingy, btw

Retr0id•2mo ago
s/mainstream/mainline/

But yes, this is definitely an issue. I've been playing with a 2013-era Samsung device that came with a 3.0 kernel. It can run pmos with said kernel but there are multiple root LPE vulns. I've been looking into getting it to run a mainline kernel just for fun, but it's not going to be easy.

pabs3•2mo ago
I note that Linux mainline has a device tree for the "Samsung Galaxy S1 (GT-I9000) based on S5PV210", not sure how complete it is though. Lots of others too:

  $ grep -rhoE 'Samsung Galaxy[^"]+' ./arch/arm*/boot/dts/ | sort -u
monerozcash•2mo ago
This is the kind of task I've found tools like Codex to be pretty good at. You just have to be able to give it good enough access to test and debug its work.
hn_acc1•2mo ago
The main question is WHY? I already have a 3570K box running our NAS, plex, Wifi repeater admin, etc, etc, and it would be trivial to put up a web server via python or something.. If I had any need for it.
KetoManx64•2mo ago
How do I use your box to host my web server?
hn_acc1•2mo ago
Sure, a phone could work - but only if you don't already have another server anyway. The downsides of a phone are probably too much of a pain over a cheap $50 used server.
4k93n2•2mo ago
maybe because phones have a battery (built in UPS) so they will keep running if the power goes out. its only useful if you have a router that can be powered by an external battery pack i supoose
layer8•2mo ago
For some reason I was expecting a RasPi in a rotary phone enclosure.
Jemm•2mo ago
I use my old phone to proxy serial data to tcp. Also gives me macros and a video/audio feed. But most relevant to this is it has a built in webserver.
dang•2mo ago
Related ongoing thread:

This blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46049981

bdbdbdb•2mo ago
It's through this link that I today discovered that a surface RT can run Linux. I think I got rid of mine already. Would have been nice to breathe some life into it
karlkloss•2mo ago
I can run a web server on a $1 microcontroller, so what?
sgt•2mo ago
I tried this once a few years ago.. had half a dozen Samsung Android phones running an SSH daemon with some functionality that could be remotely accessed. However, what I learned is that phones generally don't like to run 24/7 as servers. They start giving you trouble after a while, never figured out why.

But I suspect it's just the "always on" nature and the battery. The usage pattern is just entirely different than having a phone in your pocket and using when you need it.

You're welcome to try though, maybe phones got more reliable.

jayd16•2mo ago
I don't think people generally turn off their phones so it would be interesting to learn exactly what the difference was.
sgt•2mo ago
Exactly but I suspect phones last longer when they are in idle/near sleep mode with screen off.
jayd16•2mo ago
There was an era of mobile chips where they would clock very high for burst performance and get very warm, then throttle, and then repeat the cycle. It might be an issue of not properly getting into "sustained performance mode."
phonkd•2mo ago
better of compiling android kernel with docker support and using docker
leobg•2mo ago
I have an old iPhone XS lying around with a broken digitizer. Basically, it's recording phantom touch events all the time, making it unusable. Though the screen itself, camera, CPU etc. are all working fine.

Any ideas what I can do with it to give it some purpose?

vjerancrnjak•2mo ago
Inspired by this, went to look into how much performance I can squeeze and turns out Qualcomm software practices are so bad that I can’t do much but accept old software.

It sounds like Qualcomm has to do everything from scratch on their hidden Linux software for every new chip.

justmee•2mo ago
There is a much easier way to do this without renting a VPS or anything. If you download and install the Localtonet application from Google Play or Termux, it is very easy to do.
zoobab•2mo ago
With proot-distro under Termux, you can also run a container with proot-docker script.

Right now you have to find a skopeo binary for your arch, but that's WIP.

guluarte•2mo ago
psa: remove the battery just in case
mixologic•2mo ago
This sounds more like "How to add more devices to a botnet."

Exposing a port isn't exactly a safe thing to do nowadays, and I'd be wary of the security posture of an "old phone". Proceed with caution.

erremerre•2mo ago
Asking from ignorance here.

Assuming you are using an old phone with termux to serve de webpage. What could be an attack vector?

The phone will be running Android 7.1