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The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
(packmates.org)
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Running web services on a device that hasn't seen a security patch in 3 years seems like a bad idea.
Also, unless you can mount a real hard drive, you are going to very quickly run into I/O bandwidth issues and flash longevity limits
@RegalPotoo Maybe I should have been more specific in the wording of my title.
No one planning on hosting public multi-user service that would see some serious traffic would probably benefit from hosting on a phone.
Someone who wants to simply run a single-user instance or their personal nextcloud? I think that's a real possibility.
It's a really cool idea, and the internet would probably be a better place if more people took ownership of their infrastructure rather than relying on ad-supported "free" services, and it's easy to criticise an approach that I've spent maybe 10 minutes actually thinking about - I've got my reservations, but if you can make it work it would be awesome
It is possible nowadays: I'm hosting quite a few services on an 5 years old Android. Just with Termux, no root required. Of course connectef it's just to the internal network due to all the security concerns mentioned in the post.
To solve all the bandwidth/connection issues, I've bought a usbc-ethernet dongle that works like a charm.
To mitigate battery issues I've limited the charging to 85%.
I would never host Jellyfin there, but with webdav and Kodi I can get my media served easily to all my devices at home
The risk that @regalpotoo mentioned is still unmitigated though, single user instance or not. At worst, the personal data can be exfiltrated. At best, the server can be used as a part of a botnet. Even if the software (nextcloud) would be patched, that doesn't help against exploits on a OS level.
Granted, one could run services inside a vpn and have some kind of preventive / monitoring controls, but you're still need to implement some kind of defense in depth in order to protect it.
I'd also be worried about battery issues
Don't want to find it having overheated / turned into a pufferfish
Future news headline: “The web server literally exploded under the DDOS attack.”