On Android devices, it’s generally difficult for apps to maintain persistent background services. I’m curious how you were able to prevent Android from terminating the process, and how the Pixel 5 server managed to keep running?

> I had original plans to turn the lab off at night and then the phone could keep running from battery. But, the homelab became critical infra and has to be always on lol.

I've rebuilt my entire setup a while ago to "tolerate" power loss.

- Everything is sliced into three zones: "always-on", "desktop", and "homelab". The latter two through a smart plug, so that power can be cut.

- Always-on includes the SOHO router/AP, a RasPi4, and my Mac mini. The router's switch has only two ports populated: the Pi, and the Big Switch.

- Desktop is things like the screen, speakers, dock, wireless charger, camera (dummy battery), cute lamp, etc. All of this can tolerate power loss at any moment.

Homelab: this is the tricky part. There's a big (52 ports!) switch that "everything else" is plugged into, including my Mac (yay 10Gig Ethernet, not sure what for). A bunch of SBCs like Pis, NVidia Jetsons, x86's, etc. Nothing important, still figuring out what to do with all of that, so I kinda don't care if the power is cut.

The important bit is the NAS (RAIDZ 3x3TB). ZFS makes you feel like you're invincible, but I've still built something to keep it clean: 1. it's powered down until required; 2. the router has a cron job to WoL the NAS 5min before all backup jobs start; 3. the NAS has its own cron job that waits for the backups to complete, then waits for all SSH sessions to terminate, then shuts itself down. You can kill the script via SSH.

What I'm planning to do is to build a simple daemon for each box, that checks in once per minute or so, to ask if it's time to shut down. Once everyone is clear, cut the power. Somewhere far down my TODO list ;) until then, you can also use an iOS shortcut to SSH to each box before asking HomeKit to throw the switch, but storing passwords is fugly and handling separate pubkeys is too much bother. So I'm mostly happy with it as-is.

Can you write up how you set that up? It sounds intriguing.

approximately 0% of phones can be easily opened up, or have any way to extend their hardware other than usb

Old phone? It's a Pixel 5 from five years ago. My first Android ever in 2012 already supported 802.11ac with speeds faster than any internet connection I've ever had

This is one of the longstanding issues with Android, yeah. Pixel 5 went EOL in 2023, though did get some extra (probably security) updates last year.

OEMs and SoC manufacturers have been getting better about upstreaming stuff recently from what I've heard (thank you Qualcomm!), but as far as stock OS images go I wouldn't expect manufacturers to support them for one moment longer than they have to.

This is part of why efforts like PostmarketOS are so helpful. Ironically, if this was an even older Pixel 3a, you could run it with modern software: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_3a_(google-s...

Limit your attack surface by using a simple stack, and limit the incentive for hacking. Countless sites operate just fine on old software.

This sounds a lot like the GRiSP project: https://www.grisp.org/

I laughed at "Having a website that is fully offgrid". I _guess_ not being connected to the electrical grid while still being connected to the internet qualifies as "offgrid", but it kinda feels wrong to me.

I am guessing a business analyst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analyst). Basically, someone who facilitates creating and communicating stakeholder analysis across a business. The idea is that a BA would have a thorough understanding of everything across a business. Think of them as a product owner in scrum, except there is a bit more overlap working with different parties both internal and external to the business.

You will likely find a BA (or someone with a similar role under a different name) in most large organisations (and likely in quite a lot of medium ones, too).

As per tim (thank you tim), yes, Business Analyst. I ask annoying questions to make sure everyone understands what the actual problem is rather than everyone making their own assumptions where there's ambiguity.

An additional device just to facilitate wired network usage over wifi usage felt like unnecessary additional complextiy and probably higher power usage. The blog author replied, however, saying that wifi was a bit flaky, explaining the design choice.