7 ms·

Many of the comments are from the point of view treating the phone as a desktop to use directly with is not very nice experience. I want to treat the "old" pho

Many of the comments are from the point of view treating the phone as a desktop to use directly with is not very nice experience. I want to treat the "old" phone as a server: 8 cores , 6 GB Ram, UPS, plenty of storage(expandable), Low power consumption , small form factor, redundant network 4/5G+Wifi, has built in screen and "keyboard" for time when you need to do debugging. Does others experience with this kind of setup? What services are you running ?

throw8932894 5y ago
I use phone as a wifi hotspot and file server with Termux (sshd, ftpd). Works pretty well.
MayeulC 5y ago
PostmarketOS gets you pretty close to this: boot alpine Linux, with more or less everything working. Even if the screen and/or GPU acceleration do not work on that phone, that would be plenty to replace a Raspberrypi. I've been thinking about this quite seriously, and for now I see a few pain points: - Some phones (looking at my daily driver, a Galaxy S4) do seem to allow disconnecting the battery from the charging circuit, which could lead to issues in the long run - Ideally, you'd want to connect a USB hub over USB OTG (wired Ethernet, USB storage, real keyboard). I have yet to try charging the phone at the same time, although I think some cables enable this.
pishpash 5y ago
I/O is too bottlenecked to "serve" anything serious. It's the problem with most SoC including Raspberry Pi.
- freemint 5y ago
  USB 3.1 over a USB port shouldn't be a bottleneck. You just need an adapter that suits the need.
  - pishpash 5y ago
    What phones have USB 3? Almost all phones still do USB 2. It's not about the port (USB-C), it's what the host I/O is capable of.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      The initial crop of USB-C adoption was mostly USB 2.0, but almost everyone has been USB 3+ for a long, long time now. All the Pixel phones except the 3a are USB 3 or higher, for example. And for comparison Samsung has been using 3.1 since the Galaxy S10e. I just checked my Pixel 5 for example reports USB 3.2 (as in, that's what it's actually connecting as to a Linux host per bcdUSB)
      - pishpash 5y ago
        What about actual transfer speeds? The signaling protocol gives the max speed. If something is I/O bottlenecked inside the phone it's still slow.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  What's "serious" here? Even ignoring USB 3, most servers should work fine when capped to 100 or 200Mbps.
felixding 5y ago
I had a small Ruby (Sinatra) website running on a Linux vm on a spare Android phone (Sony Xperia X Compact). Turns out the CPU is quite capable. It actually compiles Nginx faster than a low end Google Cloud vm. It sounds nothing, but looking at Nginx logs scrolling on a tiny phone screen is so unbelievable.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Symbian did it first, there was an Apache version with mod_python available from Nokia themselves.
chakkepolja 5y ago
For that you shouldn't need virtualization though. With termux you can run lot of programs. There are termux packages for few server software. You should be able to compile some more yourself. I remember being able to run a rootless debian chroot (using utility called proot) on Android 9 device, but things might have changed in meantime and I don't know if it's still straightforward. If you're looking for serious performance, though, it may not be practical.
- cosmaioan 5y ago
  In terms of performance my expectations is to be comparable to the vm/vps from cloud providers where IOs are also limited, and with plenty of RAM for many workloads this will not be a big issues.
- shakna 5y ago
  The permission policy changes introduced by Android Q broke Termux's ability to peacefully coexist with the Play Store. [0] [0] https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2155 https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2155
  - userland_tech 5y ago
    UserLAnd is still getting updates on the Play store. It can run multiple distos without requiring a rooted device. note: I am the developer of UserLAnd.
- awoimbee 5y ago
  It would be best to create a kubernetes cluster of phones (reliability, scalability,...). To run containers on Android you currently need to build a custom kernel (1), I hope this feature removes this need. (1)https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d74bd770dce27 https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d...
ghoul2 5y ago
I did this a while back with a Pixel 2. I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Phones are not designed for continuous power draw (and consequent heat dissipation) - contant-use power dissipation limits are very low. The performance dips dramatically, and the constant high temperature kills the onboard flash prematurely. Same thing applies to the radios - wifi and cellular. Sustained data transfer on either of those interfaces causes issues - dropouts/disconnects/thermal reboots. This is in addition to the fact that phones just don't have great I/O.
- hawski 5y ago
  Maybe a solution to the problem would be a case that would provide cooling and would hide cables and adapters. The result could still be somewhat smaller than a NUC. Then you would only replace the phone once in a while and would have to cut a new screen cover. For better cooling depending on the phone you could remove the back cover.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    "Gaming" phones do this, actually. Most of them though have poor software support compared to "thin" flagship models with far more problematic thermals.
  - ghoul2 5y ago
    Yes, and that can improve the situation a bit, but it quickly becomes a tail-wagging-the-dog situation. A heatsink requires very good thermal contact with the main heat-dissipating elements - the SoC, the DRAM, the flash, and the radios to be effective. None of those are easily accessible on a phone unless you are willing to dissassemble it entirely. And even then the contact with the heat sink will be poor due to the package and the other components. An external case can help to a very limited extent. I tried attaching a large PC heatsink, and it did help, but not to the extent that made the "server" any good. I just switched it out for a 50$ RPI4 and its vastly better in pretty much every way.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
sirius87 5y ago
I set up an old phone to run a torrent client (qbittorrent). It was a Debian 8 chroot [1] that I could ssh into. In the end, it really wasn't worth the hassle. Networking ports would go unresponsive when the mobile CPU on the phone would go into "deep sleep". The battery began expanding after a few months. CPU was more than capable to do the actual processing work. I/O with the SD card was passable. I really wish someone would invent some sort of generic battery adapter that could transform any device requiring a battery into something that can run on direct power. I really adore that old Sony Ericsson Xperia android device. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid
- cute_boi 5y ago
  Till this date, I don't understand why phones don't work on direct power without battery. There should be some engineering problem...
  - utucuro 5y ago
    The correct answer is simple: there is no profit in it and therefore no reason to do it. Any work or addition to the BOM of a phone for this purpose is therefore a waste.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    Probably some phones do work on direct power without battery. But anyways in the general case the user wants the battery to charge when they connect their phone. Not allowing the phone to run without a battery will show more clearly that there is an issue with battery connection or battery itself, than if the phone would run when connected to power without battery.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > Not allowing the phone to run without a battery will show more clearly that there is an issue with battery connection This is a non-issue since battery status (or lack thereof) is clearly shown in the UI. A more likely issue is that the battery is commonly relied on to deal with peaks in power draw, beyond what can be supplied via the USB port. This can even be an issue in many laptops.
querez 5y ago
I ran an odroids ( https://www.hardkernel.com/ https://www.hardkernel.com/ ) as my home server some years back. It worked nicely for what it was, but in the end the lack of good storage options (I ended up attaching USB harddrives) was what doomed it. For what it's worth, a RasPi is exactly what you're describing, minus the screen/keyboard (but with much better cooling, which is what would be the bottleneck otherwise).
- loudmax 5y ago
  Odroid N2s can use EMMC storage which has worked out pretty well in my experience. For larger data sets I use a network filesystem anyway.
sbayeta 5y ago
Plus built-in UPS
- dotancohen 5y ago
  And a bunch of sensors. Things like GPS, accelerator, microphone, camera, are pretty much standard even on inexpensive smartphones going back half a decade.
anderspitman 5y ago
This is basically my vision of how to bring self-hosting to the masses. Upcycle an old Android phone. Install apps for Nextcloud, Jellyfin, etc. Do a quick OAuth2 flow with your domain name provider to tunnel a subdomain directly to the app, and you have an end-to-end encrypted private cloud. For this to work we need: * Simpler domain name providers targeted at consumers instead of IT professionals. You shouldn't need to understand DNS records to use a domain. * An open protocol for setting up tunnels[0]. * Nextcloud et al need to implement the protocol on their end. For open source projects 3rd parties can make wrappers. [0]: https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protocol/30 https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protoc...

throw8932894 5y ago

I use phone as a wifi hotspot and file server with Termux (sshd, ftpd). Works pretty well.

MayeulC 5y ago

PostmarketOS gets you pretty close to this: boot alpine Linux, with more or less everything working. Even if the screen and/or GPU acceleration do not work on that phone, that would be plenty to replace a Raspberrypi. I've been thinking about this quite seriously, and for now I see a few pain points: - Some phones (looking at my daily driver, a Galaxy S4) do seem to allow disconnecting the battery from the charging circuit, which could lead to issues in the long run - Ideally, you'd want to connect a USB hub over USB OTG (wired Ethernet, USB storage, real keyboard). I have yet to try charging the phone at the same time, although I think some cables enable this.

pishpash 5y ago

I/O is too bottlenecked to "serve" anything serious. It's the problem with most SoC including Raspberry Pi.

freemint 5y ago
USB 3.1 over a USB port shouldn't be a bottleneck. You just need an adapter that suits the need.
- pishpash 5y ago
  What phones have USB 3? Almost all phones still do USB 2. It's not about the port (USB-C), it's what the host I/O is capable of.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    The initial crop of USB-C adoption was mostly USB 2.0, but almost everyone has been USB 3+ for a long, long time now. All the Pixel phones except the 3a are USB 3 or higher, for example. And for comparison Samsung has been using 3.1 since the Galaxy S10e. I just checked my Pixel 5 for example reports USB 3.2 (as in, that's what it's actually connecting as to a Linux host per bcdUSB)
    - pishpash 5y ago
      What about actual transfer speeds? The signaling protocol gives the max speed. If something is I/O bottlenecked inside the phone it's still slow.
Dylan16807 5y ago
What's "serious" here? Even ignoring USB 3, most servers should work fine when capped to 100 or 200Mbps.

felixding 5y ago

I had a small Ruby (Sinatra) website running on a Linux vm on a spare Android phone (Sony Xperia X Compact). Turns out the CPU is quite capable. It actually compiles Nginx faster than a low end Google Cloud vm. It sounds nothing, but looking at Nginx logs scrolling on a tiny phone screen is so unbelievable.

pjmlp 5y ago
Symbian did it first, there was an Apache version with mod_python available from Nokia themselves.

chakkepolja 5y ago

For that you shouldn't need virtualization though. With termux you can run lot of programs. There are termux packages for few server software. You should be able to compile some more yourself. I remember being able to run a rootless debian chroot (using utility called proot) on Android 9 device, but things might have changed in meantime and I don't know if it's still straightforward. If you're looking for serious performance, though, it may not be practical.

cosmaioan 5y ago
In terms of performance my expectations is to be comparable to the vm/vps from cloud providers where IOs are also limited, and with plenty of RAM for many workloads this will not be a big issues.
shakna 5y ago
The permission policy changes introduced by Android Q broke Termux's ability to peacefully coexist with the Play Store. [0] [0] https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2155 https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2155
- userland_tech 5y ago
  UserLAnd is still getting updates on the Play store. It can run multiple distos without requiring a rooted device. note: I am the developer of UserLAnd.
awoimbee 5y ago
It would be best to create a kubernetes cluster of phones (reliability, scalability,...). To run containers on Android you currently need to build a custom kernel (1), I hope this feature removes this need. (1)https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d74bd770dce27 https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d...

ghoul2 5y ago

I did this a while back with a Pixel 2. I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Phones are not designed for continuous power draw (and consequent heat dissipation) - contant-use power dissipation limits are very low. The performance dips dramatically, and the constant high temperature kills the onboard flash prematurely. Same thing applies to the radios - wifi and cellular. Sustained data transfer on either of those interfaces causes issues - dropouts/disconnects/thermal reboots. This is in addition to the fact that phones just don't have great I/O.

hawski 5y ago
Maybe a solution to the problem would be a case that would provide cooling and would hide cables and adapters. The result could still be somewhat smaller than a NUC. Then you would only replace the phone once in a while and would have to cut a new screen cover. For better cooling depending on the phone you could remove the back cover.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  "Gaming" phones do this, actually. Most of them though have poor software support compared to "thin" flagship models with far more problematic thermals.
- ghoul2 5y ago
  Yes, and that can improve the situation a bit, but it quickly becomes a tail-wagging-the-dog situation. A heatsink requires very good thermal contact with the main heat-dissipating elements - the SoC, the DRAM, the flash, and the radios to be effective. None of those are easily accessible on a phone unless you are willing to dissassemble it entirely. And even then the contact with the heat sink will be poor due to the package and the other components. An external case can help to a very limited extent. I tried attaching a large PC heatsink, and it did help, but not to the extent that made the "server" any good. I just switched it out for a 50$ RPI4 and its vastly better in pretty much every way.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago

sirius87 5y ago

I set up an old phone to run a torrent client (qbittorrent). It was a Debian 8 chroot [1] that I could ssh into. In the end, it really wasn't worth the hassle. Networking ports would go unresponsive when the mobile CPU on the phone would go into "deep sleep". The battery began expanding after a few months. CPU was more than capable to do the actual processing work. I/O with the SD card was passable. I really wish someone would invent some sort of generic battery adapter that could transform any device requiring a battery into something that can run on direct power. I really adore that old Sony Ericsson Xperia android device. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid

cute_boi 5y ago
Till this date, I don't understand why phones don't work on direct power without battery. There should be some engineering problem...
- utucuro 5y ago
  The correct answer is simple: there is no profit in it and therefore no reason to do it. Any work or addition to the BOM of a phone for this purpose is therefore a waste.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  Probably some phones do work on direct power without battery. But anyways in the general case the user wants the battery to charge when they connect their phone. Not allowing the phone to run without a battery will show more clearly that there is an issue with battery connection or battery itself, than if the phone would run when connected to power without battery.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Not allowing the phone to run without a battery will show more clearly that there is an issue with battery connection This is a non-issue since battery status (or lack thereof) is clearly shown in the UI. A more likely issue is that the battery is commonly relied on to deal with peaks in power draw, beyond what can be supplied via the USB port. This can even be an issue in many laptops.

querez 5y ago

I ran an odroids ( https://www.hardkernel.com/ https://www.hardkernel.com/ ) as my home server some years back. It worked nicely for what it was, but in the end the lack of good storage options (I ended up attaching USB harddrives) was what doomed it. For what it's worth, a RasPi is exactly what you're describing, minus the screen/keyboard (but with much better cooling, which is what would be the bottleneck otherwise).

loudmax 5y ago
Odroid N2s can use EMMC storage which has worked out pretty well in my experience. For larger data sets I use a network filesystem anyway.

sbayeta 5y ago

Plus built-in UPS

dotancohen 5y ago
And a bunch of sensors. Things like GPS, accelerator, microphone, camera, are pretty much standard even on inexpensive smartphones going back half a decade.

anderspitman 5y ago

This is basically my vision of how to bring self-hosting to the masses. Upcycle an old Android phone. Install apps for Nextcloud, Jellyfin, etc. Do a quick OAuth2 flow with your domain name provider to tunnel a subdomain directly to the app, and you have an end-to-end encrypted private cloud. For this to work we need: * Simpler domain name providers targeted at consumers instead of IT professionals. You shouldn't need to understand DNS records to use a domain. * An open protocol for setting up tunnels[0]. * Nextcloud et al need to implement the protocol on their end. For open source projects 3rd parties can make wrappers. [0]: https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protocol/30 https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protoc...