How Can I Be A Sys-Admin On The Road?

Peter Cooper asks: "I'm a server administrator who also has to visit clients, meaning I'm often out of the office. As a 'one man outfit', this means my servers are at risk during this time. I was planning to get a cellphone that can receive e-mail, and a PDA which can connect through the cellphone, so that I can SSH from anywhere in the country, but the amount of phones, PDAs, and connectivity options, are very confusing. Do other admins have recommendations for phones, PDAs, or other systems so I can be an admin on the road? I'm in the UK, but suggestions for elsewhere are also welcomed, as others may find them useful."

Comments

TWO WORDS - SHARP ZAURUS

[Anonymous Coward]

you need it my man .. it's made for guys like you .. I have one and it is awesome ... I even do CVS/Apache/PHP development on it, check it on th local webserver, commit my source code, then SSH over to the production machine, all while sitting on the shitter in the morning and listening to my 100GB+ MP3 collection sitting on my NFS server!!

I have a modem card, Wifi card, ethernet card, and a James Bond infrared folding keyboard (the pocketop, really cool and folds up small).

IrDA is built-in, that works fine for me, but bluetooth is also an option.

you will not be disappointed in the Z. buy one today.

A decent combination

[krist0]

I have a Sony Ericsson p900, i got myself the putty ssh client (it says its for the p800, but its basically the same thing) as well as a vnc client (remember from slashdot a while ago....oh well)...

I am to lazy to google for the links, but its a pretty spiffy package.

Failing that, you could always get yourself a tungsten c, it has a keyboard, making ssh sessions easier, however you have to connect via wifi or ir....wifi isnt always available and ir needs LOS to a phone to work, can be cumbersome.

but the p900, gprs, ssh works a charm.

Re:A decent combination

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I am to lazy to google for the links, but its a pretty spiffy package.

Yeah,

He's one of us, allright!

Nokia 9210

[amackinlay]

Nokia 9210, Mindterm java SSH client and a monitoring box with mon.d and ssh_client (or a Skymo account).

UNIX or OS X laptop

[bastardsquadmuzz]

I'm not a sysadmin so I couldn't answer from personal experience, but I would have thought that the best tool would be a *NIX or a Mac OS X laptop. Then you have a keyboard to type on rather than faffing about with styli and handwriting recognition, and they are able to connect easily to all three major OSes. A Windows laptop would hinder rather than help you, because most of the tools you would need would be absent. I have a Palm m500 and the handwriting input is a pain sometimes, and I find it much easier and faster to use a keyboard. A bluetooth phone and PCMCIA card might be helpful though for when there's no phone socket nearby.

Re:UNIX or OS X laptop

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'll second this option - it's gotten possible to get a decent laptop rather inexpensively. I'll throw in a blatant plug for the Averatec 3150H that I just picked up for similar reasons. $900 new, and every single component appears to have viable working linux drivers as well (including even the software modem, which Smartlink makes and offers the driver source - though it's not GPL). My only complaint is that the obnoxious "restore disk" is the only copy you get of the software that it comes with, and the disk completely re-images your drive if you use it.

I ended up using the ntfsutils program to shrink the windows partition, and then making an image with dd of the section of the drive including the partition table and Windows(tm) section (I HAVE normal install disks for the Linux portion...).

I find myself regularly having to travel and still be able to be in contact with the main office to do support, which I think would be a serious pain to try to do on a telephone or with a PDA. On the other hand, a phone or PDA is substantially cheaper...

I'd recommend a Sony Clie UX50 or next generation

[Enfors]

I'd recommend the Sony Clie UX50, or the next version of it when it arrives. It's a PalmOS based PDA with built-in bluetooth and Wifi in a "mini-laptop" form factor with a thumb keyboard that's bigger than that of most other PDAs. There are SSH clients and reasonably good mail clients and web browsers for PalmOS, so you should be OK in that department.

You can go to far...

[MarkusQ]

You can go a long way with this sort of thing...some might say too far.

When I was out to dinner with a group of friends a few years back one of them (who was a sysadmin for a medium sized company) interrrupted herself in mid sentence, pulled out her pager, looked at it, laughed, pulled out her PDA, made a few cryptic graffitesque gestures, said "Ha!", and pulled out her cell phone.

The conversation went something like this:

"Wally, why are you using Sara's computer?"

"Then you should have used one of the other machines in the sales department. You know the graphics people have asked the sales people not to use their machines without asking."

"That's right. And while I've got you on the line, do you happen to recall the company policy about browsing to inapropriate web sites?"

"Well, you know you shouldn't open attachments like that. Especially when you're using someone else's computer."

"Allright then. One last thing Wally: don't fuck with me."

Then she hung up and continued with what she'd been saying.

-- MarkusQ

Re:You can go to far...

[Wolfrider]

--D00d, your friend is teh ROOT! Is she single?? ;-)

Re:You can go to far...

[MarkusQ]

--D00d, your friend is teh ROOT! Is she single?? ;-)

Last I heard she was "complex". It may be possible to cast her to single and then use the normal single operators on her, but everyone I've seen try this has seg faulted with a nasty access/privlege level violation message within a few seconds. Trying sleep() or u_sleep() is especially not recomended.

-- MarkusQ

9210

[Gaima]

My 9210 can do all that, in one neat package.
You've got a excellent colour screen, full keyboard, pop/imap mail client, calendar, etc.

When I last looked, admitedly a long time ago, the only ssh client I could find was the commercial one from ssh.com. There is an ass load of software available via Nokia too.

The only major draw back is the lack of GPRS, but HSCSD is good enough for ssh.

OK, so it's a big phone, but when it's in it's holder and on my belt I don't notice it. There is no weight to it at all.

Here's my solution...

[MrIcee]

I live in hawaii but monitor servers in Indiana and elsewhere. I use a PALM Tungsten W which gives me Mobile Internet and also has a slot where I plug in WiFi for my local home network.

I also use Kuuaki which is a program for the Tungsten W that lets you monitor your servers CPU, processes (web cgi dns etc) get a short TOP display, etc.

Works quite well as a solution and the PALM also lets me telnet in. The keyboard is useable and the W is very durable and web browsing works pretty well.

6310i + Pocket PC

[unixbob]

I used to use an Ipaq 3630, but now I'm using a Dell Axmin X5. Bluetooth to the pocket pc, dialling in to a 33,6 RAS service (Orange is the mobile company provider). It's not the quickest thing in the world, but it's the most accessible. If I'm in the centre of town, I don't want to carry a laptop around with me. Even round at a friends house, setting up a VPN setting on his PC on his ADSL (where his router doesn't support VPN passthrough for example) is too much trouble.

MochaSoft Telnet is a decent SSH client for Pocket PC.
you can get a VNC Viewer for Pocket PC here
and a Terminal Services client for PocketPC can be downloaded here

I guess it depends on what you are after. Many of the suggestions here mention laptops and that's OK if you are just generally working remotely. But (even the skinniest one's) are bulky to carry around and require an additional bag to be lugging around. If you just need to ensure that you are able to to remote support in disaster situations whilst on the move, then the Pocket PC w/ bluetooth to a Nokia 6310i is a solution which I have used successfully. (I'm UK based if that makes any difference)