My server is a phone now

After using a small Hetzner VPS for personal infrastructure, the author decided to repurpose their CMF Phone 1 as a server. This decision was driven by rising DRAM prices and the phone's powerful hardware specifications. The phone, equipped with eight ARM cores, 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of flash storage, Wi-Fi 6, and a 5G modem, seemed ideal for running various web apps and services.

The author first attempted to run a normal Linux distribution on the phone using postmarketOS, but encountered issues with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hardware acceleration. After recovering the phone's stock Nothing OS, the author decided to keep the phone in its original Android state and use Termux as the host environment. Termux provided essential tools like OpenSSH, runit, Caddy, Cloudflared, and package management, while Android handled the hardware-specific tasks.

To ensure smooth operation, the author configured Termux to start the supervisor and SSH after a reboot and set up Tailscale for a stable private address. Ansible was used to build an Android host profile, enabling persistent wake locks, disabling idle modes, exempting specific Termux processes, and configuring Tailscale as the always-on VPN. The recovery chain was crucial for uninterrupted server functionality.

The author's applications, already available as Linux ARM64 OCI images, were easily run using proot-distro, which allowed Termux processes to believe they were operating within a Debian root filesystem. While Caddy ran directly in Termux, the Surf browser faced compatibility issues and required rooting the phone to achieve proper performance.

Ultimately, the author found that the CMF Phone 1, when running Linux applications through Termux, provided a reliable server that leveraged the Android hardware while maintaining Android's capabilities.