my server is a phone now

My personal server has transformed into a smartphone, leveraging an old CMF Phone 1 with powerful hardware and Android's capabilities. The phone now runs Surf, a managed Chrome instance, a personal finance tracker, a screen sharing service, and various web applications. Despite the phone's limitations like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hardware acceleration, it still manages to stay alive and reachable even as it transitions between networks.

Initially, the server was created by flashing a normal Linux distribution onto the phone, but this led to a dead end when the user encountered issues with Wi-Fi and other features. To resolve this, the user reverted to the stock Android system, treating Termux as the host environment. Termux provides essential tools such as OpenSSH, runit, Caddy, Cloudflared, package management, and Unix tooling, while keeping the phone's hardware-specific work intact.

The user employed Ansible to configure the device as a server, enabling it to remain active even during reboots. Despite not being a conventional Linux server, the phone's Linux kernel with a robust userland proves to be sufficient for running the applications. The user's applications, already in Linux ARM64 OCI images, were successfully run using proot-distro, which acts as an application compatibility layer.

By rooting the phone and mounting a Debian filesystem, the user achieved compatibility for Chrome to run efficiently, while Termux continues to handle the hardware-related tasks.