[nixusg]

A couple months ago I setup an old Android phone to be a 3G hotspot for some ESP8266 devices. It also created a SSH reverse tunnel so that I could access the devices from the internet. After rooting the phone, compiling autossh & nginx and getting the whole system setup, the phone broke. At this point it was cheaper and way easier to just get a RasberryPi with a 3G dongle. So unless you have lots of the same old phone lying around this can be a lot more work than the alternatives. Using something like http://janos.io/ may have made things a bit easier but device support was an issue.

[brbsix]

Getting a Dropbear or OpenSSH server set up on Android can be a mess. For a super simple setup that "just works", you can just use a SSH server application (e.g. Rooted SSH/SFTP Daemon [0]) and a ZeroTier virtual network [1] so that you can access the devices from the Internet.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=web.oss.sshsft...

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zerotier.o...

[wiredfool]

Yeah, I've got a couple of old android phones here that would be useful for repurposing, if they would actually get out of the bootloader.