My server is a phone now(seg6.space)
50 pointsby seg62 hours ago8 comments
  • Kuinoxa minute ago
    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.

  • thehamkercatan hour ago
    "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%?

    • daemonologistan hour ago
      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.
      • hnuser123456an hour ago
        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.
        • Forgeties7935 minutes ago
          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?
          • hnuser12345617 minutes ago
            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.
          • johnecheck29 minutes ago
            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)
      • jdiff13 minutes ago
        How many phones have you tested this with?
    • yhjc2692an hour ago
      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.
      • rcxdude4 minutes ago
        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.
      • cfiggersan hour ago
        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.
    • seg6an hour ago
      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.
    • guilhermeasperan hour ago
      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.

      • wandaan hour ago
        Couldn't you just have it charging on a time-regulated supply e.g. smart plug?
  • firasd33 minutes ago
    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

    • mohamedkoubaa22 minutes ago
      A couple of old phones and a gaming laptop with a broken screen makes a beast of a cluster
  • bogzz28 minutes ago
    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.

  • agnishom22 minutes ago
    Shouldn't it be "My phone is a server now"?
    • Waterluvian19 minutes ago
      “My daily driver is a clown car now.”
  • hackernud3s42 minutes ago
    I've never heard of Surf but I can run 10x camoufox instances on a $8 VPS no problem. I highly recommend it.
  • yoyohello1329 minutes ago
    I thought this was going to be a rant about QR code menus.
  • domeinhornMOT18 minutes ago
    [flagged]