I turned an old Huawei phone into a tiny network server

I had an old Huawei phone sitting around, so I decided to see how far I could push it as a little network appliance.

It actually started because I wanted to root the phone. That went… badly.

I managed to half-brick it while messing around with the bootloader/rooting process. After getting it back into a usable state, I decided to take a different approach and see what I could accomplish without full root access.
Now it handles things like:

● DNS filtering
● Network routing/proxying
● Traffic handling for gaming
● Various background network services
● Running continuously without needing a PC

It’s currently been running non-stop for about 2 days.
I also left it running overnight while gaming traffic was going through it. It handled roughly 9 GB download + 8 GB upload, while the phone only dropped about 8% battery over that overnight period.

It also has an remote web dashboard which isn’t optimal but still works its janky but overall it works.

The Web UI Gives Access to Battery Percentage, Status , Connected Devices And More, Currently couldn’t showcase it because im in the middle of patching it, Had Some bugs.

Also Has an Reskinned UI thats Much Faster Than The Stock UI, It has a new control center and volume bar but i didn’t go way overkill just some small touches.

The biggest pain was Huawei’s aggressive background power management. I had to configure it so the OS wouldn’t automatically kill the services.
The phone’s battery also means the whole thing has a built-in UPS of sorts, which is pretty funny for something that started as an old phone.

It’s obviously not replacing an actual server for serious workloads, but I’m genuinely surprised at how much networking I can get out of an old Android phone.
So yeah, I accidentally half-bricked a phone trying to root it and somehow ended up turning it into a server instead.