Do You Use Your Phone As A Server?

5 days ago by ptt to c/asklemmy

I have a rooted redmi note 11 pro 4g with unofficial lineageos installed. It is my personal device. But I barely use it. If someone calls I pick up, that's about it. The phone is completely clean too, no trace of whatsapp or anything like that. The most bloated app on the phone is brave. Like I said, squeaky clean. Now I want to turn this into a machine using plain termux or chroot to run piefed, gotosocial and stuff, and host my blog page, but I am undecided. Since it's rooted, I thought I could set up something that starts charging at 45% and cuts off at 75%. What do you think I should do?

The main question is in the title. If you run a server on your own device, what do you host on it?

ByteMe 4 points 5 days ago

I tried hosting podcasts but I didn't make it.

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AstroLightz 3 points 3 days ago

If you use a Syncthing app on android, you're technically running a server (Syncthing) in the background.

That's pretty much the only server I run though.

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dihutenosa 3 points 5 days ago

Yes. Works fine. PostmarketOS, though, not Lineage. It runs an offsite monitoring system for the rest of my selfhosted stuff - Prometheus, Grafana, stuff.

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hexagonwin 2 points 5 days ago

i used to host some simple website and sftp/webdav fileshare a long time ago. it works. its just a computer

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vortexal 2 points 5 days ago

I don't see why you couldn't use a phone as a server as long as the battery doesn't cause problems.

I've never done it but I have heard of people using their old phones as a NAS (network attached storage). The closest I've ever done was to connect two of my android devices together via Bluetooth and use that to transfer files between the two devices. It's slow but it works.

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enchanted 2 points 2 days ago

Back when rooting was all the rage I tinkered with hosting various services. It just didn't make much sense for such an underpowered device, amongst other reasons (battery swelling).

I did use an old phone to "host" a game automation. One of those "idle clicker" / RPG games since I'm so lazy. After about 2 months the battery swelled and popped the back cover off. That was the end to that idea..

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ptt 1 point 2 days ago

This may be due to consistently 100% capacity, high voltage, and high temperature.

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anzo 2 points 5 days ago

I wouldn't trust an old battery, nope

(I rather use free tiers of paas providers or rent a vps that anyway is as cheap as electricity. The issue there is going to be storage, then you need a homelab or nas and setup tunnels for apps like nextcloud. That's what I am doing.)

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monovergent 2 points 5 days ago

No, I was fortunate enough to pick up a bunch of decommissioned Celeron mini PCs from work. I run a NAS with media server on one, pi-hole on another, and a test server on a third. I meant to make things accessible from outside with VPN, but was too lazy.

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muimota 2 points 4 days ago

Try tailscale, it is free and makes the whole process super easy.

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eldavi 2 points 5 days ago

i used to use my old phones as security cameras feeding into the motion app and set them up to buffer recordings if they lost contact. fwiw

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OADINC 2 points 5 days ago

Could you do something similar as this for your battery?

Newer phones don't open as easy.

Great Scott Video

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ptt 1 point 2 days ago

==============================
 STATUS  August 18, 2026 12:39 AM
==============================

[off]  battlimit
[off]  sshd
[off]  caddy
[off]  cloudflared
[off]  boot automation
[off]  sleep lock

------ battery ------
level : 56%
status  : Discharging
limit  : 0
current  : -355,000 uA
temperature : 340 (tenths of a degree)

I set this up using Termux. When "battlimit" is enabled, it caps the battery charge at 60% and the device runs solely on USB power. I also had the chance to configure Caddy, Cloudflare, and others. With Termux, I can easily turn these on and off via a widget. They start up without any issues every time I reboot.

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