I started out when I got a new phone, and didn't know what to do with the old one. One of the ideas I had was a homeserver. Turns out it's not trivial to run Docker even on rooted Android phones, and you need a lot of kernel patching, tweaking and more and it still had issues after that.
The next step was when I figured out I could install postmarketOS on it, and I managed to flash it, SSH into it and set up Nextcloud for our photos and unbound as a recursive DNS for my home network. I thoroughly recommend postmarketOS, and the contributors are amazing as well.
I was however running out of storage, so I ordered an 256GB SD card, and set up mergerFS between it and local storage, worked fine.
After some time however, I got paranoid about having and old device with a LiPo battery constantly being charged in my home, so I decided to get a mini PC from Aliexpress and chucked a 2TB SSD in.
In the meantime, I discovered Immich, which turned out to be much better for photos than Nextcloud, and fell in love with it.
The final thing I added was a miniDLNA service to play my local movies and shows on my LG TV without having to bother with Plex/Jellyfin and reencode anything. Unfortunately, it kept disappearing after roughly 2 days of operation, so I just added a cron job to restart it at 5 AM.
For the time being, I don't need anything more and am turning my attention to other things.
I started out when I got a new phone, and didn't know what to do with the old one. One of the ideas I had was a homeserver. Turns out it's not trivial to run Docker even on rooted Android phones, and you need a lot of kernel patching, tweaking and more and it still had issues after that.
The next step was when I figured out I could install postmarketOS on it, and I managed to flash it, SSH into it and set up Nextcloud for our photos and unbound as a recursive DNS for my home network. I thoroughly recommend postmarketOS, and the contributors are amazing as well.
I was however running out of storage, so I ordered an 256GB SD card, and set up mergerFS between it and local storage, worked fine.
After some time however, I got paranoid about having and old device with a LiPo battery constantly being charged in my home, so I decided to get a mini PC from Aliexpress and chucked a 2TB SSD in.
In the meantime, I discovered Immich, which turned out to be much better for photos than Nextcloud, and fell in love with it.
The final thing I added was a miniDLNA service to play my local movies and shows on my LG TV without having to bother with Plex/Jellyfin and reencode anything. Unfortunately, it kept disappearing after roughly 2 days of operation, so I just added a cron job to restart it at 5 AM.
For the time being, I don't need anything more and am turning my attention to other things.