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- Hacker News
- I thought this was going to be a rant about QR code menus.by yoyohello13
- Can you please tell me more? I'm trying to build a self hosted application (with Claude) so people can scan a QR code and place orders / send messages to the kitchen without having to flag down a server / waiter. It is supposed to save time and money for the restaurant and for the patrons and customers it is supposed to be more convenient. Do you not like this option?by collabs
- I wouldn't view swapping Hetzner for Cloudflare as a gain in freedom.by ceving
- But then how else would you write your self-congratulating blog post?
- Crazy timing. I did the same thing last week!
I have an old oneplus 6 and all I did was plug it into my computer and told Claude what I want and it just worked.
I even told it to make sure the battery doesn’t charge above 80% to not fry the battery and it couldn’t find the setting so wrote something to make it work.
I feel like this whole thing would have taken a weekend pre AI - instead I did it on a whim and spent about 5 minutes on it and it took less than 2 hours of wall clock time.
by dannyeei - Cool project, but slightly better: before the rampocalypse I bought one of those aliexpress fanless linux boxes designed to be a router. I put a 32GB stick of ram in it and a 250GB SSD. I run opnsense in a virtual machine to serve as my home router and then I put the rest of my home server stuff on other virtual machines on that same box. It's still fanless/silent. It takes up zero additional space because it is my router. It would already be running 24/7 because it is my router so the additional energy usage of an additional VM is likely minuscule. The latency to my router is basically zero since it is on the same physical box. And it is using a real SSD so it has faster storage with almost certainly better endurance.by craftkiller
- Love the idea, great work!by seg6
- Router with fanless gpu for AI load , nvme slot will be game changingby iamgopal
- 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
by firasd - The thing I've heard with people who do this "at scale" is to expect the phones to burn out. They're made for pretty bursty activity so if you try to do too much on em continuously they start acting weird real quickby rtpg
- A couple of old phones and a gaming laptop with a broken screen makes a beast of a cluster
- I've been saving phones in my drawer for years, waiting to combine them to form a "supercomputer".
Any day now!
by sejje - I work in a place where we have about 100 phones in a server room that we use for automated testing of mobile apps. A few phones get chucked out every year due to bloated batteries. We’ve even had one or two explosions. We have them well cooled now and in fireproof containers. We try to do some power management like automatically discharging them every once in a while etc…by madwolf
- Is it not worth the effort to take them apart and take the batteries out before you put them into the rack?by KetoManx64
- Nokia went through a phase in around 2006 of seriously believing the future was people liveblogging and serving it over 3G from Symbian based Series 60 devices. This was based on "Apache Raccoon" https://sourceforge.net/projects/raccoon/files/raccoon/PS_1_... which was a port of Apache to Symbian, and a port of Python for scripting, complete with the ability to write multithreaded code (GIL excepted) using Symbian Active Objects.by fidotron
- I so wanna know more about this, I'll be spending a chunk of the afternoon reading on this story.
The future used to be so cool. Having access to Wikipedia and live reporting always on hand was going to make everyone so informed, easier communications were going to make democracy and grassroots organizing flourish... We were all going to have our own server on our pockets...
We were naive, but I sorely miss the tech-optimism that to some extent carried me through uni.
by ikurei - 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.
by SturgeonsLaw - I mean, it's hard to beat almost free. The phone was being unused, therefore it was free hardware for this project.by yohannparis
- not to mention avoiding all the headaches with android
- Old thin clients can be good deals too. Dell Wyse 5070s are great for basic tasks, especially if you can get the Pentium Silver J5005 models. They take M.2 SATA SSDs and they don't have UEFI whitelists on their M.2 WLAN cards, meaning you can get one of those M.2 A+E key SATA cards and connect a SATA HDD to it. Expect to pay around $40-$50 for a Dell Wyse 5070 with 4GB of RAM and eMMC storage. You can easily add an SSD, and since it takes M.2 SATA SSDs, you can buy lightly used ones relatively inexpensively.
Old Optiplex are also good deals. I bought a Dell Optiplex 5070 MT for $150 for myself and 2 Dell Optiplex 3070 SFF computers for $75 each to replace my mom's aging Windows 7 PC. All 3 computers take DDR4 and M.2 NVMe SSDs and have an Intel i5-9500 CPU that will also run Windows 11 pretty well, if you're into masochism that is.
by Denatonium - Yep. My 2010 server does everything I need incredibly well, and I see no point in retiring it anytime soon.
ASRock H67M-ITX, i3 2.5GHz, 16GB DDR3 1333Mhz, 2TB+4TB SSDs, DVD-RW, in this Mini-ITX Antec case[1].
by hakunin - I just bought a refurbished Lenovo k14 with 32gb of ram and Corei7-1165G7 with 500gb for 350$ which I'll use as my 2nd home server.
My first home server is a 2nd hand gaming PC that I bought for 500$ with 32gb and 7700rx video card that I use for GPU based tasks but it's quite audible when it's working so wife and I agreed it has no place in the living room anymore and is being deported to the corner of my office.
You can still find really good bargains for home servers from refurbished good computers, and given how well solved tech reliability is now, it's really not worth buying new.
by wraptile - This is my situation exactly. Got an i5-4570 with 16GB, no GPU, running Unraid with a bunch of containers for Jellyfin, qBittorrent, Crafty Controller (minecraft), HomeAssistant, etc.
I'm using a PCIe expansion card to get double NVMe drives for the cache disk, and then three (up to five) 3.5" spinning 8TB drives for long term.
I tried really hard to get it on 32GB but sadly the motherboard only has two slots and only supports 8GB DDR3 modules. I literally ordered some of the rare late-generation 16GB ones and it refused to boot, with no firmware updates available from the vendor (Advantech, board is an AIMB-274).
by mikepurvis - Second hand SFF office PCs are super good for this. Machines like Lenovo Thinkcentre or Dell Optiplex.
Because there are so many of them (at least in Denmark where I live) they are pretty cheap and it's easy to get one with an I-processor.
My current machine's idle draw is also very low at 5-6w.*
*Based on some quick research it does seem that I was a bit lucky with mine, so I guess it's fair to mention that mileage may vary.
by jeppester - It only makes sense if we are measuring raw capability per dollar. Once you factor in noise, physical size, idle power, battery etc, I think the calculation changes.
For a home sever that's mostly idle, it is almost like commuting in a pickup truck.
by coffeecoders - 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-unlock-wall-of-shame
by alightsoul - I mean root In androidby alightsoul
- cve-2026-0047 if the phone is before March 2026by fragmede
- If you're hosting behind a NAT device, you can just map external port 80/443 to internal port whatever. You can bind any port 1024 or higher.
Termux is only slower without root if you use proot. PRoot provides a limited implementation of chroot that runs unprivileged in userspace, but this also causes it to be pretty slow. If the server software you want to run is available in the Termux repos, you can use that and have it run at full-speed.
Termux works by patching all programs to treat /data/data/com.termux/files/usr as the root directory and /data/data/com.termux/files/home as the home directory. This introduces some compatibility issues, but it doesn't make it any slower.
The Termux project has a great wiki at https://wiki.termux.com/
by Denatonium - Postmarket os is required if your device runs android 7 or below due to termux limitations which prevent you from installing packages, or if your android version has missing kernel syscalls that prevent you from running containers without x86 emulation which is slow.
Rooting is required to install postmarketos, and making termux faster and bind to ports on Android. You don't need postmarketos if your android version can run containers on termux with all the required kernel syscalls
To root or install postmarketos you need an unlocked bootloader.
by alightsoul