I swapped a small Hetzner VPS for a personal server after the cost of dedicated CPU machines crept up. The cheap shared machines were fine until Surf’s Chrome workload starved them. I looked at mini‑PCs, but the CMF Phone 1 I already owned—8 GB RAM, 128 GB flash, Wi‑Fi 6 and a 5G modem—was a cheaper, already‑bought option.

I first tried flashing a normal Linux distro, but the phone’s Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth and GPU drivers were broken. Restoring the stock Android image showed that Android already had reliable hardware support, so I kept it and used Termux as a lightweight host. Termux runs OpenSSH, runit, Caddy and Tailscale, while Ansible keeps the host in a persistent state.

For most services I used PRoot to mount Debian filesystems, but the heavy Surf workload required a real chroot so Chrome could use the native kernel. Now every application lives in a private mount namespace, and the whole stack is reproducible from a single Ansible playbook.

The phone now hosts જન, a screen‑sharing service and several web apps, all surviving reboots and network changes.