How to Turn Your Android Phone into a Multipurpose Server

You may have come across countless articles that tells you about all possible uses for old computers.  An interesting solution will be to turn it into web server, file server, network attached storage device or a proxy to tunnel through from work. But if you don’t have a spare computer lying around to turn into a server, free app Servers Ultimate can do it to an old Android phone.

While individual apps that let users run different server software on their Android devices has been available for long, Servers Ultimate is a one stop shop for all your server needs. This new free app can turn your Android phone into 10 different kinds of servers. These are DLNA, DNS, Dynamic DNS, Email (POP3 and SMTP), FTP(S), Proxy (tunneling), SMS Gateway, Time (NTP or TP), HTTP(S) and/or (secure) WebDAV.

Turn Your Android Phone into a Server

With such a wide range of options you can do all kinds of stuff like stream music from and to your phone using DLNA, browse and transfer files between your device and your computer or another device through FTP or WebDAV. You can also setup your Android device as an email server to send and receive mails or set up an SMS gateway. There are other options like setting up a time server or a proxy tunnel or a plain old HTTP web server.

How to Setup a Server on Android Phone

Setting up and running a server is easy, and the best of all – it doesn’t require root access.

  • Download and install Servers Ultimate and add servers from the list.
  • Name the server, enter a port number or let the device assign a random port to prevent conflict between your server and currently running apps. In most cases you will be asked to add a folder – the location that you want to be accessible through the server.
  • After you have created and saved the server, you will find it listed in the main screen.
  • From there, you can start and stop the servers with a single touch. You can even run multiple instances of the same server type at the same time, although the free edition limits this to only two.

The servers can be started and stopped depending on the connected Wi-Fi network, and can be started on boot or on when the app is started. You can even restrict connection to your device from only specific IP addresses.

If you wanted more space than your 32GB SD card can provide, you can hook up an external drive to most phones via USB and use that as your main data storage.

For more ideas check out this thread on the XDA Developers forums.

Features of  Servers Ultimate Android App:

  • DLNA media server: add multiple roots, support for Samsung devices (television)
  • DNS server: caching, forward to dns server, use web dns server for requests, only access from certain IP’s, add rules to block or change requests
  • Dynamic DNS updater: run dynamic updates to keep your server(s) available, select from predefined ddns services (set a custom URL, or choose from ChangeIP, DNSdynamic, DNSexit, DNSMadeEasy, DNS-O-Matic, DNSPark, DtDNS, DynDNS, easyDNS, eNom, HE.net, Joker, Namecheap, No-IP, ZoneEdit), set timer, username, password, hostname, SSL supported, update on connectivity change
  • Email server: POP3 and SMTP server, set domains, set users
  • FTP(S) server: allow access from certain IP’s, enable SSL/FTPS Implicit (custom or our certificate), allow anonymous login, per user set username, password, document root, force stay in document root, allow write access, allow custom FTP commands (CUSTOM SENDLOG, CUSTOM STOP, CUSTOM VIBRATE)
  • Proxy server: only allow access from certain IP’s, enable HTTPS requests, supports GET and POST, set tunneling by forwarding everything (allows the proxy to work for other protocols beside HTTP as well, like FTP), add rules to block or change requests
  • SMS Gateway: allow http access, allow access from certain IP’s, add rules for incoming SMS (body, from), forward to SMS, email or URL, and add users with maximum amount of allowed sms per month
  • Time server: user the Network Time Protocol (NTP) or simple Time Protocol (TP)
  • Web, HTTP(s) server: use simple htaccess (.shtaccess) file to set directory specific configurations (like password, directory listing, encryption, upload, Server Side Includes, and way more!), enable SSL/HTTPS (custom or our certificate)
  • WebDAV server: enable SSL (custom or our certificate), only allow access from certain IP’s, allow web browsing, allow HTTP digest authentication, add multiple users

[via XDA Developers]