Selfhosted

40154 readers

629 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

102

The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android? (packmates.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

104 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?

Wait, what?

Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.

We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...

The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.

It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.

In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."

Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/broadband-coverage-europe-2021

PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.

cc: @selfhosted
#selfhosted #selfhosting

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I'm just using them as a glorified small Linux box it could work pretty well. If you're going to host services that don't require a ton of bandwidth you don't need a hard line or anything. Hell my Plex server is using WiFi (802.11ax but still) and it delivers 4K just fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Shit, I run plex of my synology ds1621+ and it chokes on 4k regularly. This is with a cabled connection. It's almost certainly the CPU though. These things are weak as hell. What're you running plex on ?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Admittedly the server on which it's running is pretty beefy and I don't let it transcode. I've got enough disk space that if something spends time transcoding I just optimize it to a new version of the file.

By bandwidth I was speaking in terms of network only, but if you were to run it on a simple server that didn't do any transcoding it might be ok.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah ok makes sense. Yeah it's definitely not latency or throughput causing stuttering for me. Gonna definitely be the anemic CPU. Luckily I have an extra laptop that I haven't used in years that would make a perfect addition to the homelab. Can just through linux on it and use it as a plex/roon server

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah my server is an i5 using an onboard GPU so it's nothing crazy but it's got 80TB of drive space, so I optimize for what I put my money into.

Hell, sometimes it's even easier to copy the data to my gaming rig, transcode it, and rsync it back. If I'm done playing for the night and about to go to bed and I have like a TV show or something I know has to be transcoded, I'll just queue up a job and let it run while I'm sleeping and script it so it rsyncs everything back when it's done transcoding.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's definitely a good call. Before I even had a NAS, I'd just throw some movies and stuff on my macbook when I had to travel. Problem is that when you're loading it up, you think you know what you'll want to watch and then later you just wish you had different choices.