That's the big hurdle though - mainstream kernel support.
For most devices, even if they can be rooted and jailbroken, you're stuck with the kernel they come with. Doesn't have a new feature you need? A horrible security flaw in the network stack? You're out of luck. Most "repurpose your old phone" approaches have this problem. You can make it a server but you wouldn't want to expose it to the public Internet.
But yes, this is definitely an issue. I've been playing with a 2013-era Samsung device that came with a 3.0 kernel. It can run pmos with said kernel but there are multiple root LPE vulns. I've been looking into getting it to run a mainline kernel just for fun, but it's not going to be easy.
$ grep -rhoE 'Samsung Galaxy[^"]+' ./arch/arm*/boot/dts/ | sort -uI think it's basically for the same reason as why they dropped 32-bit x86 support about 8 years ago. Not enough users. (That resulted in the unofficial Arch Linux 32 to maintain support.)
I write this from arch on arm (orange pi) thingy, btw
Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely - the battery management on board will keep it in a state where its a constant charge which means the chemistry will be stable.
I think if you're considering re-harvesting old devices to use for hosting and get far enough down your list to get to phones then you've likely got enough constant maintenance costs in overseeing things that the additional worry of fire risk just isn't worth it.
What is your source on this?
I've replaced the battery in always-plugged-in iPhone 3 times over 10 years because it was expanding into a spicy pillow.
I too want a way to run phones directly off of USB power, without a battery present.
Would you say this is a chemistry/QA problem? Have there been advances in battery / controller technology that achieves the above?
(This is for a removable battery, but should be close for built-in ones too, I suppose)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM&pp=ygUYZ3JlYXRzY...
But I suspect it's just the "always on" nature and the battery. The usage pattern is just entirely different than having a phone in your pocket and using when you need it.
You're welcome to try though, maybe phones got more reliable.
Just thermal paste to the battery hah
In order to prevent issues this time around I've preemptively removed the back of the phone, and the camera modules so I can have a nice flat phone. Then I bought a heatsink nearly the same size as the phone itself. I've got thermal pads on the SoC which sits lower than the battery and the heatsink itself had thermal adhesive on it pre-applied which is sticking to the battery/phone frame holding it to the phone. No more phone overheating worries and if the battery goes pillowy it should just pop the heatsink up instead of warping the whole phone.
If you can think about how deep into technicalities the most average person you know gets, then you can also understand that ~half of everyone is even less technical than that.
There's nothing wrong with this. That's just the way that it is. (We can accept this or be frustrated. Acceptance is more useful.)
As a workaround, I find that searching by part number provides a good filter.
Maybe I want a very particular Moto G Power to use for whatever. I don't search for any permutation of "Motorola G Power" at all, because that description doesn't help me.
Instead, I just find the part number (maybe something like "XT2041-7") and search for that instead.
This excludes a lot of listings straight away, and that's fine: I don't want to stumble through listings from people who don't know what they have. I only want to buy what I want to buy, and what I want is an XT2041-7.
It sounds like Qualcomm has to do everything from scratch on their hidden Linux software for every new chip.
This blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46049981
(or maybe be able to use recovery zip that requires effort after every reboot)
Simple root, with a custom degoogled rom, and termux is all you need.
You don't need root if you webserver is listening on a port over 1024.
Termux plus some webserver like nginx is all you need.
Now to make it reboot resistant is another story.
Any ideas what I can do with it to give it some purpose?
Exposing a port isn't exactly a safe thing to do nowadays, and I'd be wary of the security posture of an "old phone". Proceed with caution.
Assuming you are using an old phone with termux to serve de webpage. What could be an attack vector?
The phone will be running Android 7.1
ive been looking to build and serve my own servers and i have been considering to use old android phones to outright racks but the part I am still struggling to figure out is how to serve it publicly without ISP catching on as they require business plans for that and its not cheap
ISPs will have rules (maximum data volume per month) and restrictions (ISP equipment auto-drops all sending/receiving packets on port 25, 80, 443, or 456), but within those limits the ISPs do not care as long as you cause no problems for them.
Also, one of the easiest ways to expose e.g. port 80 of your in-house server is to just have your local server do an SSH port-forward to a remote server like a cheap VPS. Note that by default it'll bind to a localhost port on the remote, so on the remote you'd need to have an HTTP server reverse proxying to the remote localhost:8080, or you need to enable `GatewayPorts: yes` in sshd on the remote. Assuming you turn on GatewayPorts on remote.example.com, here's how you could expose port 80 of localhost:
# Run this on in-your-house-computer to allow folks on public internet to visit
# remote.example.com:80 but have the traffic served by in-your-house-computer:80
ssh -R :80:localhost:80 username@remote.example.com
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...
Although, you may also go with a 5$ virtual host (e.g. Linode Nanode 1 GB) and wireguard to build your own tunnel (or just the 5$ virtual host to run your server)
No. No ISP who desperately tries to grow marketshare at all costs and lock their customers into a year-long contract will intentionally ban users. I'm not even sure where this misconception comes from, it's not like ISPs led a massive PR campaign warning people of the dangers of running a server.
The only way you will get banned is if you cause disproportionate strain on their network, which means you'd need to exceed the usage of the typical gamer (downloading games worth hundreds of gigs regularly), streamer (streaming 4k video for hours at a time), cloud backup customer (uploading gigabytes regularly), Windows user (in its default configuration Windows can use P2P to share updates), torrenter (sustained full-duplex bandwidth usage), and unlucky idiot with a compromised device spewing DoS traffic at line-rate.
Saturate the pipe consistently for several days by hosting video? Yeah sure you could get a warning and eventually disconnected, assuming they don't already have traffic shaping solutions in place to just silently throttle you to an acceptable level and leave it up to you to move your homebrew YouTube clone elsewhere when you realize it's too slow.
Hosting a website which will have a few mbps worth of traffic with the occasional spike? That's a rounding error compared to your normal legitimate usage, so totally fine.
The reason most consumer ISPs have a clause against running servers (not even defining what counts as a server) is to preempt a potential business starting a data center off a collection of consumer connections and then bitching about it or demanding compensation when it goes down or they get cut off. Nobody cares about a technical user playing around and hosting a blog at home.
Some may block port 80 and 443 "For Security", but you can sometimes contact the support and they'll open it, even if you're not a business.
I have a webserver running at home and use the free dynamic dns from noip.com.
Not sure what changed, but things got more complex - and more expensive, too.
IP4 address exhaustion.
(I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not shutting down anybody's servers.)
Friends from other countries, India for example, have had different experiences though, where IPs were on a much more frequent rotation and required scripted solutions.
No? I mean, I'm sure there are ISPs out there that do it, but that's a ridiculous thing to do.
Right now you have to find a skopeo binary for your arch, but that's WIP.
The battery will swell and explode if you run 24x7 on a phone.