Nothing beats my toaster serving my webpages.
How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
11–20 of 122 posts
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Wireguard tunnel via a free tier or dirt cheap VPS, or a VPN provider that lets you forward ports like Proton
but can't the ISP still see something is up if there is traffic 24/7
Yes, though even though they can see that, as long as it's encrypted they can't know for sure, so as long as you don't cause problems they won't care at all that you're using it for something. In all my years I've never had an ISP complain about constant encrypted traffic, though some ISPs do have general data caps like Comcast.
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#13so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that? 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…
It used to be easier to get a web server up and running in the past. I remember the 1990s fondly.
Not sure what changed, but things got more complex - and more expensive, too.
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#14so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that? 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…
> don't ISPs detect these and ban
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.
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#15This sounds like a fun project. A perfect use for an old android phone sitting in the junk drawer.
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#16Title should be updated to include "unused android phone"
"unused android phone with unlocked bootloader that is supported by postmarkOS"
(or maybe be able to use recovery zip that requires effort after every reboot)
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#17so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that? 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…
ISPs don't care, actually. They care about operational problems, but you serving a constant stream of web traffic is probably not going to matter to them; web traffic for even a pretty successful blog is going to be a tiny volume compared to you streaming 4k movies from Netflix.
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
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
but can't the ISP still see something is up if there is traffic 24/7
Don't ISP's just charge per caps on ingress and egress volume? From your comments it is clear that they don't. Super infuriating. Why should they care what I do with ingress and outgress that I paid for, as long as I am not hurting them.
His comments are based on fear-mongering he read somewhere or an overly-literal interpretation of terms and conditions written to cover the ISP's ass in every theoretical situation possible.
ISPs who enforce data caps already priced it in and technically have an incentive for you to exceed your cap as fast as possible so you pay to increase said cap (they can however still slow down your traffic as they wish, to ensure sufficient capacity for everyone).
ISPs who don't enforce a cap actually still internally enforce a reasonable cap of several terabytes at their discretion. And of course, they can and will use traffic shaping to ensure the integrity of their network so your usage doesn't affect others. If you exceed that soft cap consistently several months in a row they may get in touch, but other than that you're fine.
TLDR: host your server and enjoy. When you get to the scale of the next YouTube, then you have to worry.
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Wireguard tunnel via a free tier or dirt cheap VPS, or a VPN provider that lets you forward ports like Proton
but can't the ISP still see something is up if there is traffic 24/7
Amount of traffic is what matters. Are you saturating your pipe 24/7 for an entire month? Sure, you may have problems. But you'd have the same problems if you were torrenting (let's assume legal torrents here, I am not talking about copyright) or hosting a mega LAN party with hundreds of people streaming their games all at once.
Otherwise, no worries.
Re: How to repurpose your old phone into a web server
#20so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that? 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…
Other folks have given general answers, but I'm wondering, what ISP do you have, and where?
(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.)