Nokia Mobile Web Server

» see mymobilesite.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The idea is one sentence long and it still sounds slightly illegal. Your phone is a computer with a network connection, so your phone can be a web server, and other people can type an address and read things off it. Nokia Research Center built exactly that. The project was called Raccoon and it was a Symbian port of Apache 2.0.54 with mod_python bolted on, shipped as one installer with Python for S60 inside it, and in June 2007 Nokia put the finished version out through Beta Labs as the Mobile Web Server.

What you got was a phone that answered HTTP. The default site let a visitor browse the photos on the handset and search the contacts, and there was a page for composing an SMS from the browser window. Files came out over WebDAV. Access was set per user or per group and defaulted to the owner only, which was the sensible setting given that the server was running on the thing in your pocket with every phone number you had in it. Version 1.0 is dated 23 October 2007 and the stable 1.5 landed on 18 November 2008, under the Apache license.

This landed in the last stretch of my engineering degree, and the appeal of it has not worn off. The appeal was always demonstrative rather than practical. It showed that the split between a client and a server is a networking arrangement rather than a fact about the hardware, and that a handset from 2007 had enough machine in it to sit on the answering end of a request. Nobody needed this. That was never the interesting part.

~ the chronicle ~

~ why your phone had no address ~

The server was the easy half. The hard half was that a phone on a mobile network does not get a public IP address, because carriers do not hand them out, which means no request from the open internet can find your handset no matter what is running on it. Nokia solved this the only way it could be solved from the outside: with a gateway.

You registered a name and got a hostname under mymobilesite.net, so the phone answered at something like rafe.mymobilesite.net. The phone itself opened the connection outward to Nokia's gateway and kept it open, and the gateway accepted requests from the world and pushed them back down the pipe the handset had already established. Every visitor to your phone was really a visitor to Nokia, forwarded. That arrangement is the whole reason the thing worked and the whole reason it could be switched off from one place.

~ the day the gateway stopped ~

Wikipedia carries one flat uncited sentence about the ending: as of January 2010, the project had been discontinued by Nokia. That kind of sentence is usually where a date goes to die, because nobody ever goes back and checks it. This one happens to be exactly right, and the gateway's own capture record proves it.

mymobilesite.net served a normal page of about 3.8 kilobytes every month from the middle of 2007, unchanged in size through the whole of 2009. The capture on 7 January 2010 is a working page at 3,975 bytes. The next capture, 4 February 2010, is a 302 redirect of 274 bytes, and so is every one after it, until by late 2010 the host is answering 403 and keeps answering 403 into December 2011 before going silent. One month, start to finish.

Nothing replaced it, because the thing it was fighting never went away. Carrier-grade network address translation is still how a phone connects, and the device in your pocket today is a hundred times the computer an N95 was and is still structurally a client. Nokia proved the other arrangement was possible for about thirty months, behind a single hostname that one company paid for.

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