Projects/Kubernetes on e-waste

Project: Kubernetes on e-waste
Beschrijving	Kubernetes on e-waste
Start	2026-01-29
Contact	Polyfloyd
Status	Beta

Here in Europe, people are looking for ways to ditch US-tech. This includes family and friends of mine. And there are plenty of alternatives such as NextCloud and Immich. Thing is, software nowadays is run as a service and the typical friends and family should not be expected to know how to administrate a Linux server.

But social circles do contain the occasional Linux nerd such as myself. However, I can not provide all of the hardware. Especially since RAM has become unaffordable thanks to our good friend Sam Altman. But what if I do not have to? What if people would scavenge their drawers for their old smartphones and hand it to me to provide the hardware to host their services on?

Hardware

I gathered a couple of old Android phones to test this scheme with.

OnePlus 6

I got this one for € 50. Flashing was trivial and it seems to run well. The standard PostmarketOS kernel lacks some kconfig flags to support docker, so I had to compile a custom kernel.

Fairphone 3

This phone was free because it was completely broken. On a hunch, I attempted to reflow the SoC with the hot-airgun which made it come back to life. Flashing PostmarketOS was also super easy. Also needed kconfig tweaking to get Docker to work.

OnePlus 8 Pro

Has some cracks in the screen and case which reduced the price to a mere € 40.

TOOD: flash to PMOS.

Quirks

kconfig

It would be handy to enable the kconfig options for docker/k3s by default. TODO: Ask the PostmarketOS people whether this is desirable.

containerd

Containerd fails to start because of a misconfigured path. Would be handy to fix upstream in either Alpine or PostmarketOS, whichever ships this mistake.

Feb 07 19:06:26 fairphone-fp3 (ntainerd)[2010]: containerd.service: Unable to locate executable '/usr/local/bin/containerd': No such file or directory
Feb 07 19:06:26 fairphone-fp3 (ntainerd)[2010]: containerd.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /usr/local/bin/containerd: No such file or directory