<i>So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi.</i><p>When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean<p><i>So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.</i><p>I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).
> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic)<p>Does your ISP have a problem when your computer/phone/etc does a cloud backup? Or when you torrent? Because both of those will max out your upload bandwidth much more than hosting a static website.<p>I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.
> <i>I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.</i><p>Look at your agreement with your ISP. They typically segment the market into consumer/business plans where running a server requires a business plan versus a consumer plan.
I do use a VPN, but I have torrented many, many terabytes of, errr, Linux ISOs. I haven't ever gotten so much as a nastygram from Verizon, and I still appear to get pretty close to advertised speeds.
> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).<p>The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago
cloudflare is caching the image:<p><pre><code> ```
accept-ranges: bytes
age: 5397
alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
cache-control: max-age=14400
cf-cache-status: HIT
content-length: 3013598
content-type: application/octet-stream
date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT
last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT
server: cloudflare
vary: accept-encoding
```</code></pre>
wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure
Exactly. I think this shows two things quite nicely:<p>- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)<p>- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot
Closer to 10 at peaks, but a lot of sites are just fragile.
At one point I had <i>two</i> pages in the top spot on HN: <a href="https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114852056319245427" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114852056319245427</a><p>- 20k peak unique visitors<p>- 162k peak requests<p>- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare
I clicked and got a Cloudflare error page, said "I hope it isn't 'run a website'", and then visited the comments...
I actually delegated DNS to Cloudflare when nic.ar wouldn't take the localhost.run domain!
judging by the .ar ccTLD he's from Argentina, same as me.<p>First hand experience tells me local ISP's don't care, and/or don't know to care. they don't even serve piracy notices here (I believe most of latin america is like this) so they definitely won't be bothering with something like this
iPad now resting as molten metal and glass in the corner of the room.
Well, it's telling me:<p>502<p>Browser Working<p>Cloudflare Working<p>odb.ar Host Error
Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this"<p>And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.<p>If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.<p><a href="http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/</a>
Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.
It was amazing. Multiple applications running on different servers/machines all working side-by-side on a single desktop workstation. Effectively every GUI application could automatically be run in "client-server mode" (using the terms in the traditional sense not the inverted-X11 sense) without having to write any architecture or OS specific client code.<p>Although technologically completely unrelated, rich browser applications also fill this niche, and even share warts like the lack of standardized UX behaviors or having issues with dealing with (subtle) difference between "client environment" implementations (different browsers or X11 "servers").<p>Effectively the web browser became the universal "graphical terminal" in the same way as (in the past) serial TTYs were the universal "textual terminal". Thus X11's "killer app" just slowly became irrelevant.
I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it.<p><a href="https://arcan-fe.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://arcan-fe.com/about/</a>
Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work.<p>I suspect this will be an issue for most old devices. Especially old Apple devices (though there's hope for the newer ones now that the EU requires them to allow other browsers), but for all devices ultimately.
Check out waypipe[1] if you haven't.<p>[1] <a href="https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/</a>
Oh man it was fucking great.<p>I had a shitty pentium or mmx, with fuck all ram, my dad however had a <i>DUAL PROC</i> P3 monster just a network hop away.<p>I could SSH in and run GIMP on his machine and run <a href="https://logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal" rel="nofollow">https://logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer/removal</a> in a quarter of the time.<p>But that time has passed now. Perhaps web APIs are the best way to do that kinda offload.
oh man, between mosh and xpra at university, I thought that's how the future was gonna be.
It's called HTTP+HTML+CSS+JavaScript :)
I get a bad gateway error and can’t load the site and Cloudflare tells me it’s a host error (they are doing their job just fine, the first two bullet points assure me) so hopefully hosting a website isn’t what to do with it.
The tunnel disconnected somehow. No idea what happened, cause the iPad was still running the server correctly, maybe network issue.
I remember Cloudflare's job was to cache the page back in the day.. is it still the case?
I’m reminded of this story<p><a href="https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-server/" rel="nofollow">https://terminalbytes.com/iphone-8-solar-powered-vision-ocr-...</a><p>83,418 OCR requests processed over more than a year of operation<p>Up to 1,000+ requests on busy days<p>If you forget about the million other ways to try and solve this issue. It’s an amazing repurposed piece of tech.
I wish Apple would just unlock these things once they stop supporting them. It's such a waste of hardware otherwise.
I would love to run Linux on my old iPad hardware. The newest iPad Pro running Linux would probably be faster than my current laptop.
Less people would buy new iPads, so Apple won't do this unless forced by law and the right to repair movement.
I've tried to use an old iPad as a wall-mounted control panel. The device has continuous power but will occasionally run down its battery anyway, especially when displaying the Home Assistant app. Not consistently reproducible and annoying, but makes the device a poor match for what I want to do with it. It's a shame because it could have had a good, long post-retirement career in this role if it could only run at peak use while charging without drawing down the battery.
Kind of a nasty solution, but if you have a smart plug, you could plug the iPad into it and have HAS toggle power for an hour a day (or whatever time). That way it's as if you unplugged the iPad yourself for a period.
Sounds like you're using a low power adapter. I have a few ipad2 that the kids use for things. Even if they have 1% and we plug them in they can be used while they charge.<p>I'd also suggest lowering the brightness slightly, can make a huge difference to battery drain
I use several for home assistant dashboards and haven’t run into this issue. Possibly an undersized power brick?
This bug happens to the ipads we have set up as AV controls in conference rooms at work from time to time as well. I think I first noticed it 2 years ago and assumed it was an issue with the hub it was connected to.
I use an old IPad as a desktop status panel. Shows me timers, today's agenda, countdown to meetings and some to-do notes. A little focus/productivity tool.
This makes me so angry.<p>I have an ipad mini - a wonderful piece of hardware that can do almost nothing useful now, as OP indicates. I would love to run my choice of OS on it and not landfill the device. Instead Apple controls it, like I never owned it. Not only do they control it, they decide when it's time for me to buy new hardware and force me to landfill this one.<p>Why do I need to "jailbreak" my own hardware? Why do we put up with this madness? There should be allowance for accessing my own hardware, especially 13 year old hardware abandoned by the vendor and locked for the user.
I'm with you here. I think Apple should let you install whatever OS you want in the device after the support cycle ended. But that's not gonna happen any time soon. Until then, we jailbreak.
The hardware could absolutely be made useful too. For example Apple could have a decent low bloat long term support OS that can be deployed on a device. Maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles but who cares, at least it would be usable. They won't do this though because it makes them no money.
I am in the same boat. I have two ipads, one is probably ipad mini 2 if I remember it correctly and another one is the first ipad pro. Ipad pro is still usable but not fully functional because I cannot upgrade the os and many apps dropped support for old os. Ipad mini on the other hand is totally unusable. I even think it’s in a better shape than the pro one. It feels snappy when navigating. But I cannot use it in any meaningful way.
Apple offers recycling service, so that’s an option.
> The most common provider is cloudflare, but you need to install cloudflared on the machine you’re using to host<p>This is actually (strictly) true. You can use cloudflared on any system which can communicate with your host. This is useful in more realistic deployments as it means you can install cloudflared in a VM/container and then have it relay your services hosted in other VMs/containers/devices. It isn't helpful here as "I hosted my website on an iPad (but I now have to have this other real computer plugged in all the time so that iPad works)" is not as zesty :)
> What to do with an old iPad<p>Install Linux on it. If that is not possible, shave its head and put it in the pillory for public humiliation.
I have an old project with an Esp32 Bluetooth keyboard and an iPad 2. I only later found out that the iPad 2 does not support Bluetooth LE, which is what the Esp32 uses. If anyone knows a good solution please let me know.
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250906222008/http://odb.ar/blog/2025/09/05/hosting-my-blog-on-an-iPad-2.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20250906222008/http://odb.ar/blo...</a><p>BTW I anyone is curious, IIRC managed to jailbreak iOS 9.3.5 just from linux without any apple interaction (no cloud account), but since for some reasons phoenixpwn expired
502: Bad Gateway - Host Error.
Hilarious
I've been considering getting a new(er) iPad or iMac. I think it might have a better interface with my iPhone than my current pc. I hate to think about product lifespan, obsoleting, etc since I already have lots of devices that aged out.<p>Reading this guy's tale just made me appreciate how awesome it is to be sitting here posting on my Dell T5400 from 2008 running Win7Pro. It still runs even though there are 3 blown caps and 3 swollen caps on the mobo, and one RAM slot crapped out several years ago so I lost access to 8 GB of RAM in my 32 GB system. One of the PCie slots is also bad but so far the one with my 1070 GPU works fine driving two monitors. The only real problem is with the hard drive. Every so often I get a hardware error on the Win7Pro installation (I dual-boot Win10 Pro on this machine) and that sends me into a multiple hour reboot fest where I have to run Startup Repair several times, go Command Line in and fix MBR errors, and scannow to fix whatever else is borked.<p>At one point I spent a week on Win10 Pro (I hate that OS) because after hours of trying to force Win7 Pro to boot normally it looked hopeless. After a week of that I made the huge mistake of clicking the "install updates now" button on Win10 Pro and it proceeded to grab several years worth of updates and install them, rebooting multiple times in the process. It may have finished except that one of those updates left me with a hardware bluescreen related to a driver for the 1070 and I was not able to get that fixed.<p>After much frustration and the spewing of several one-time use profanity clusters I decided to try to boot into Win7 Pro again and it worked normally.<p>One day this machine will bork itself and I will have to accept that I can no longer operate in my beloved Win7 and have to fire up this new pc that has been sitting idle for four years now. That day is not today though.
I'm also in this situation where I have same kind of old iPad, which was lying in a drawer at my parents. It's running iOS 9.3.6, for which only a semi-tethered jailbreak exists. IIUC, this means that you can jailbreak it by side loading an app to the iPad.<p>The good thing is that you can do all this jailbreaking with free software from Linux, apparently. Of course it's endless browsing shadier and shadier / scammy websites before finding something that looks somewhat less shady. The world of iOS jailnreaking is very strange.<p>The bad thing is that sideloading requires an Apple account. I don't have one. Creating an Apple account from the device is not possible anymore. Creating an apple account from the apple website seems complicated. It wants a phone number which I'm not willing to give. I tried these services that provide burner public phone numbers to get the verification code it wants but have yet to find one that works. When i manage to get a verification code, it tells me that this is not possible at this time, please try from an Apple device. I don't have another one. I suppose I could try to run macOS in a virtual machine just for this.<p>I'd like to make this device useful. Up to recently I could use it to display music scores in PDF, I even wrote a web app for it to annotate them, but the screen is a bit broken and this makes the touchscreen very erratic to the point of being unusable.<p>I'd be happy to make it useful for something else but on the other end, I have other things more interesting to do than to deal with Apple's bullshit.<p>Too bad.
this might be a good thread to ask this as i cant get a straight answer from apple forums - i have a relatively recent iPad that was bricked after i updated to iPadOS 26 dev beta and then didnt like it and downgraded - now it simply wont turn on. its out of warranty so apple doesnt care/doesnt help - but i know the hardware is just fine.<p>what can i do with it? i'm willing to disassemble it but i have no idea where to start on what's wrong; all i know is itd be a waste if i just threw this in a trash.
Genuine question:<p>1) I am surprised there is no mention of trading it back to apple?
2) I am sure putting a decent “churn” schedule for apple devices is already been done right? Top of my head I can imagine coming up with one where for of the major product line apple offers (mbp, iPad, iPhone) we can look at the typical depreciation curve and find optimal “get in” points and “get out” points right? How hard could it be. I agreed there is a friction and activation energy needed to going down to the Apple Store and trading it in but you could get a new device every 1-2 years and keep largely churning the same out of money plus a slightly more to top up (call it premium to avoid the anger /pain inflicted by not doing it.)<p>What am I missing here ?
You can only trade it back for (time limited ?) store credits. I assume there's also additional limitations requiring you to move the device under your account for instance.<p>Selling it secund hand could be an alternative, but then the value is usually ridiculously low for older iPads, so the question is a pretty common one.
Well, you're assuming there are Apple stores in Argentina (there aren't any). So any trade in would require flying to the US (or nearest Apple store).
Wouldn't "spicy pillow" be the main problem with old iPads? My iPad Air 4th gen doesn't have an option to limit charging to 80% etc.
I'm still using an OG Gen1 64GB iPad for movies/etc when traveling. The battery does just fine and easily survives watching a full movie or two.
Good point. My old iPad's battery is still lasting very long, but I don't know how it would behave if it were indefinitely plugged.
Then you're lucky. I had iPad 2 and Air 1. Older one is completely dead for 5 years now and doesn't react to plugged cable at all, while newer charges whole day and keeps battery for 4-5 hours.<p>Air 3 I've got on ebay-like site holds pretty well but the same model that my partner got from official dealer had always issues with touch recognition.
I keep mine unplugged and it gets surprising good battery life, and I think it kinda improved with the downgrade. On normal use I would get like 8-10 hrs screen on time. No spicy pillow yet, though I did have that issue with my old iPod.
So question: is it possible to put MacOS on an M1 iPad?<p>I want a Mac with a touchscreen and a pencil. So not sure if it's easier to retrofit MacOS on an iPad or retrofit a touch screen on a Mac.<p>I know this question is adjacently relevant, but I wonder if someone has some experience in it and are willing to share :)
There are plenty of successful mods and even paid products capable of making a MacBook include a functional touchscreen.<p>As far as I know the closest thing you can do with an iPad running macOS is some form of Remote Desktop / VNC. The QEMU attempts on jailbroken iPads are unusable, and impractical. Certainly no one has done it natively (outside of Apple of course)
Gen1? Ideally on the original firmware? Display it as an artifact.
Gen2 or later? E-waste.
- Surprised UTM wasn't mentioned here.<p>Depending on the version of iPad, you may be able to get UTM SE on it, which will let you run a virtualized operating system on it.<p><a href="https://getutm.app/" rel="nofollow">https://getutm.app/</a><p>- There appear to be some jailbreaks too<p>- iSH would let you install and run local linux packages
Linux on iPad (ipadlinux.org)<p>469 points by homarp on Nov 21, 2020 | 282 comments<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172883</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko</a>
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