I have a number of old android devices that I'd like to use for ...something cool like this, but my existing homelab infra could just add an extra VM or container to do this without any likely additional power draw. It's still cool and I want to do it though.
My only query about this cool project is why not wifi? Whilst I'm sure there's a good reason for the author (and I can understand having esoteric specific requirements because I have my own "things"), but it would negate the need for a docking->Ethernet device, which feels to me like unnecessary addition of a device that requires power. Also, bandwidth / throughput probably isn't much of a limitation given the device that's being used. I think I'm mainly interested in the author's specific reason for this requirement (I'm a BA, these questions are my bread and butter).
Comment to author: Gotta add the Pixel 5 to your homelab inventory! Also, nice site, layout and information.
I agree that a VM or container doesn't add to the power usage for a homelab that's already running. I kinda did it for fun and being able to run it off solar. I had original plans to turn the lab off at night and then the phone could keep running from battery. But, the homelab became critical infra and has to be always on lol.
The requirement for Ethernet was just for bandwidth consistency. My WiFi network isn't the best.
Just curious
I've rebuilt my entire setup a while ago to "tolerate" power loss.
- Everything is sliced into three zones: "always-on", "desktop", and "homelab". The latter two through a smart plug, so that power can be cut.
- Always-on includes the SOHO router/AP, a RasPi4, and my Mac mini. The router's switch has only two ports populated: the Pi, and the Big Switch.
- Desktop is things like the screen, speakers, dock, wireless charger, camera (dummy battery), cute lamp, etc. All of this can tolerate power loss at any moment.
Homelab: this is the tricky part. There's a big (52 ports!) switch that "everything else" is plugged into, including my Mac (yay 10Gig Ethernet, not sure what for). A bunch of SBCs like Pis, NVidia Jetsons, x86's, etc. Nothing important, still figuring out what to do with all of that, so I kinda don't care if the power is cut.
The important bit is the NAS (RAIDZ 3x3TB). ZFS makes you feel like you're invincible, but I've still built something to keep it clean: 1. it's powered down until required; 2. the router has a cron job to WoL the NAS 5min before all backup jobs start; 3. the NAS has its own cron job that waits for the backups to complete, then waits for all SSH sessions to terminate, then shuts itself down. You can kill the script via SSH.
What I'm planning to do is to build a simple daemon for each box, that checks in once per minute or so, to ask if it's time to shut down. Once everyone is clear, cut the power. Somewhere far down my TODO list ;) until then, you can also use an iOS shortcut to SSH to each box before asking HomeKit to throw the switch, but storing passwords is fugly and handling separate pubkeys is too much bother. So I'm mostly happy with it as-is.
Because I wanted an Elgato Stream Deck but then thought that I have this unused phone.
I'd love to see a..."serverization" kit for some mobile devices, like the "consolized" kits developed for the game boy advance[1]: Extract the mainboard from your phone and extend it by directly interfacing it with external storage, a better power supply and a physical network interface.
[1]https://fingercramp.com/portfolio/gba-consolizer-play-your-f...
I'm not the author but can speculate. WiFi is higher latency and a bit probabilistic. Like the slowest 1% of requests to the server may take an additional 1000ms or so. And if I was running a blog from a phone I'd want it to be impressively fast. Also an old Android phone may not be able to use modern WiFi standards and it could struggle with the traffic from being on the HN homepage.
OEMs and SoC manufacturers have been getting better about upstreaming stuff recently from what I've heard (thank you Qualcomm!), but as far as stock OS images go I wouldn't expect manufacturers to support them for one moment longer than they have to.
This is part of why efforts like PostmarketOS are so helpful. Ironically, if this was an even older Pixel 3a, you could run it with modern software: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_3a_(google-s...
Also, what's a BA?
You will likely find a BA (or someone with a similar role under a different name) in most large organisations (and likely in quite a lot of medium ones, too).
An additional device just to facilitate wired network usage over wifi usage felt like unnecessary additional complextiy and probably higher power usage. The blog author replied, however, saying that wifi was a bit flaky, explaining the design choice.
problem is getting anyone to really care, though. cloud hosting is cheap.
You are paying for it to be available (or in the case of GitHub Microsoft is as an incentive).
"If you’re wondering “What about Pages?” — rest assured, Pages will remain fully supported" https://blog.cloudflare.com/sv-se/builder-day-2024-announcem...
Pages is gradually being unified into the Workers platform. For new projects we suggest just starting with Workers as it is strictly more powerful. But eventually existing Pages projects will be migrated to Workers automatically -- either that or we will just keep supporting Pages forever.
There are an enormous number of web sites hosted on Pages, it would be insane for us to turn them off.
Another concern is whether you’d still be able to get unique .pages.dev subdomains per project, it seems that workers force each account to one subdomain only across all projects. When pages get sunset dies it mean that you’ll no longer be able to make new unique pages.dev subdomains?
Also, the killer feature for many is the ability to just upload a zip hassle-free, both for production and for preview branches, the preview branches potentially serving as an extra subdomain level namespace. Would Workers still support that no-fuss workflow?
Pages is not going away. It is not "sunsetting".
What is happening is, the implementation is changing to be more closely integrated with Workers.
At present most Pages features are available directly on Workers, but not quite all, but we're working on it. Hence, we're suggesting people use Workers for new projects, but we're not auto-migrating people yet. Once we're feature-complete we'll auto-migrate people to the new implementation.
But the "Pages" brand will continue to exist, as a more-integrated part of the Workers platform. pages.dev will not go away. We will not break anyone's sites. Everything you can do with Pages today should be just as easy if not easier on the new implementation.
More than sufficient to host a site, even dynamic.
That's not to say it's not a good idea to make use of the super efficient "Pi" you already have at home in the form of (several, probably) old smartphones! Just that you'd not use it for the same purpose as a gaming desktop that can't idle below 50W
The average all-sector U.S. price per kWh is 13.20 cents (source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...). Even at the high end that’s a savings of $105.60/year, or $8.80/month.
The U.S. poverty line for 2025 is $15,650 for a single person (source: https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/dd73d4f00...). $105.60 is less than one percent of that.
Sure, energy efficiency is great and I would rather have $105.60 than not have it, but it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
It just doesn’t matter much.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is in order of environmental impact, so reusing is an upgrade!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/recycle#:~:text=To%20reuse%20...
Of course if the thing could just run directly off wall power like you suggested, this wouldn't be a problem.
Most of the devices also have a custom ROM and are rooted, and using the ACCA app I restrict charging to a maximum of 80% battery capacity.
I had a Samsung Note 5 (released in 2015) that only went spicy maybe 6 months ago. I have a Samsung S9 and a Nokia 6.1 that are both still going strong with fairly recent versions of LineageOS. Both are 2018 phones, so around 6.5 years old (old for phones, but shouldn't be 'electronically' old).
I used this method too but then LineageOS merged the functionality in a few years ago and it works perfect.
I have a Nokia 6.1 as well but my oldest continuous use device is a Oneplus 8T used to provide hotspot to a location 24/7/365.
You can also buy dummy batteries for certain models online.
1. Heat
2. Being fully charged all the time
Recording video consumes a considerable amount of power, leading to heat. The display less so, unless you're operating at maximum brightness all the time.
#2 is what killed my Pixel 3 after only about 2 years. Once I started working from home, I had a bad habit of letting my phone sit on the charger all day and after about 3 months of WFH the pillow got spicy.
For a phone that's going to be repurposed as a server, I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to open the case and attach a heat sink to the battery.
If your phone won't do that, you can use a smart power switch. Some mentioned to simply have it on a timer, but if you wanted to get fancier, you could use IFTTT to toggle it on/off based on battery percentage. I'd likely make it turn on at 40% battery and off at 60%.
Looking at the underlying block arch (Hugo), seems to be written in Go an should be pretty good for serving the content overall.
Aside: I've become a pretty big fan of SSG, and have been wanting to build a desktop mostly markdown based blog editor that then publishes to Cloudflare infrastructure... Just been lazy about actually picking it up (thinking Tauri/Rust + React/MUI for the app) with git integration and optionally direct or github action for push. I can't recall the name, but MS actually had a nice gui blog editor that integrated with a few engines a couple decades ago, but long since abandoned.
To answer a some questions: 1. Still running on the Pixel. I never had a reason to change it. 2. It is on a residential internet connection because, well, I never planned on having any volume of readers. 3. I'm just some dude that does random projects at home after work. I'm not even in tech. I actually own a construction contracting biz.
Others seem to agree, given your "I want to be left alone" post also got some HN love.
It's the best phone I've ever had, it's the perfect size and has a fingerprint reader on the back. Everything I've tried since it has been a regression.
I'd probably buy at that price, but I'm not sure what the battery condition will be like after 5 years doing nothing.
You can also talk to your ISP (or their competition). My friend negotiated something like +5€/mo for a static IP. We can play Factorio together, yay!
My IP is dynamic, but in practice only changes ~once/year. Even if I go to my router and release the WAN IP and reboot, when it comes back up, it'll have the same WAN IP. But then that once/year, my Internet randomly goes down and I have to reboot my router and I end up with a new WAN IP.
When that happens, I just go and manually update the IP for a hostname I use. If I wanted to get fancy, I could automate all this, but meh. CBF to spend the time automating something that only takes me 30 seconds to do once/year.
> I assume that ISPs generally don't want people hosting servers on residential connections.
They likely don't care unless you're saturating your upload consistently. Also, some ISPs like Comcast/XFinity are known for having extremely asymmetrical connections. At least, they used to. I'm fairly certain I've heard of some people having 1 gbps down, but only like 16 mbps up.
My first idea, to mitigate risk of fire, it’s possible to locate some hand made sand bag above the phone, so in case there’s fire, the sand would neutralise it. Also, I’d try to emulate charge-discharge cycles by enabling and disabling smart socket. I wonder if that’s possible to automate using the phone itself. E.g. when it reaches 20% it enables smart charger, and disables it upon reaching 80%. So it can do it in perpetuity. Since the screen would be off all the time, I guess one charging cycle would be once a few days. Which is twice or thrice better than average user who charges their phone once or even twice a day. So, theoretically, a Pixel with a new battery might survive a few years, if not 5 years, off one battery. Then a user might replace the battery. So, theoretically, rubbing it a server is entirely possible, I guess. Otherwise, super cool. I’d love to try this myself now. I guess that may be a perfect solar-powered server. For it, maybe one doesn’t want a smart charger. Just let the sun charge the thing whenever there’s a sunny day.
If you're buying ultra-power, you're forgoing power-efficiency.
Low cost and power efficiency are pretty much the same thing for a datacenter though, since cooling is the most expensive part. Hence e.g. AWS pushing Graviton.
And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu.
A single phone, far away from other sources of heat, used only in environments that are comfortable for humans (which may well involve active cooling at the building level), and configured to throttle down when it's used for more than a few minutes, perhaps not (although even then, I've seen phones get uncomfortably hot when gaming, and had my own phone shut down because it's too hot on occasion). If you were setting up banks of phones to run in a datacenter environment, and expecting to run them flat out, you'd probably want to actively cool them.
> And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu.
Everything is tradeoffs. Per recent posts here, the likes of AWS are now at the point of cooling CPUs directly with datacenter-scale watercooling; essentially the building's air conditioners, rather than terminating at a fan unit on the inside, feed cooling water directly to a plate mounted onto the CPU heatsink.
https://mitanshu7.github.io/html/SSH_into_Android_with_Termu...
Even outdated smartphone like samsung S9-S10 or Iphone X is way overpower than your average SBC(Pi4, Pi5), yet we mostly can't do anything because OEMs decided to make our life harder to recycle them.
I don't think it would suddenly be hosted on something else in the very few days since.
Edited to add: I don't think it's hosted via a phone with a SIM, it would appear that the device is connected to their home network.
Also: Haha, ooops, 2024 (not 2025!)
I would be extremely cautious about running a website over something running in termux, you never know when it’s going to break.
One of the solution, without root, was to run a completely emulated Linux distribution through termux and then install packages on that distribution. Things would work just as fine as on a regular server albeit the loss on performance and increased energy expenditure, which is something the author seems to care about.
Android is great in the way you can do many things with it but it always sucks hard compared to what a real device ,not artificially locked down by Google, can do.
I understand they're using grid to mean electrical grid, but still funny.
Very efficient but enough grunt to do multiple things at once and have great hardware and driver support.
Running a blog on a pixel is next level efficient
Are there any phones that do support such adapters
I currently use an old phone as a battery for a RPi
(I did something similar for Android tablets, repurposing them into an automated, digital photo frame).
Not entirely sure how he's doing TLS from a quick skim of what he's shared though.
Of course in practice, unless you're running a seed box or something, they're unlikely to find out/object. I've never heard of anyone getting dropped just for having a server on their home network, but I have heard of people being dropped for excessive upload.
Pros of using an old device?
- near no modern distractions
- VI keys (hjkl and friends) everywhere. Nchat, telescope, mupdf...
- No mice related RSI.
- batch read emails, news, newsgroups and forums. Connect once, download and upload every email and comment.
- offpunk cachés everything too, from gopher to the web. Offpunk --sync and read everything offline.
- gopher://magical.fish and gemini://gemi.dev, enough for tons of cases, even translating English into Spanish for some odd words here and there
- telescope if I want something faster over gopher/gemini/web with stargate.gemi.dev:1994 as the proxy. No ads, no trackers, no cookies, no nothing. Just the text and nsxiv to view the images as they are linked too.
- florb for Open Street Maps. Enough for GPX track editing and lurking out places and some trip.
- megafast speed. Oh, you have an i7 with Plasma/Windows 11, or worse, Gnome3? Try it against cwm as the window manager, xterm, and CLI tools. No GUI will match the speed of a TUI interface, ever.
Cons:
-no modern gaming, but who cares. Mednafen, slashem, text adventures, csokoban... there are tons of old but charming games out there.
- no JS web. But florb does it fine for Open Street Map. Maybe if I wrote some Street View client with curl/libcurl and some basic equirectangular (360 degree panorama) viewer, I would be more than fullfilled. People used to see these images on Pentium II's computers and up, you know, from 'multimedia CDs' which were from thematic/educational (as a book/magazine, but with interactive content) to software which were the literal depiction of Street View with Apple's QuickTime VR.
-SBCL for Common Lisp works so-so, under i686 just GNU/Linux, under OpenBSD it's a bit restricted unlessyou recompile it, and it will last for long. No bordeaux-threads for SBCL, and ECL drives me mad sometimes.
- GNU/Linux it's sending 32 bit support to /dev/null, but Hyperbola GNU and Parabola (among GNUinos/Devuan and others are still making your old computers usable).
If my netbook can do that... older ARM devices being far more powerful than an n270 can do crazy stuff with very low power. That's why PostMarketOS needs to suceed. I wish I would resurrect a Tokyo Techbook (ARM wm8850) with it too...