I replaced my VPS with a phone
My server is a phone now
Frustrated with VPS costs and DRAM prices, I turned my CMF Phone 1 into a home server. After a failed attempt to flash postmarketOS, I kept Android and used Termux as the host, running services in chrooted Debian environments. Ansible manages the setup, Cloudflare Tunnel provides ingress, and Tailscale handles admin. Now my server is a phone that can roam and still serve web apps.
That was the moment the phone setup became slightly ridiculous in the best way.
- tkgally
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 t […]
- thehamkercat
"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%?
- alightsoul
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-unloc […]
- SturgeonsLaw
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.
- ceving
I wouldn't view swapping Hetzner for Cloudflare as a gain in freedom.
- RinatNabiev
The Ansible + digest-pinned deployments make this feel like a real infrastructure setup, not just a toy. The dash.cmf UI is a nice quality-of-life addition.
- conradfr
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.
- firasd
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