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Which Cell Phones & Networks for SSH?
muffinresearch asks: "I've been thinking about picking up a new PDA/Smartphone in the seasonal sales, I am finding a lack of more technical information with regards to being able to use SSH software via GPRS. Now as far as I can see, the Treo 600, and the Sony-Ericsson P900/P910i can all use third-party SSH clients.However what is lacking here in the UK is info on which networks allow access on port 22, and whether this access requires a pay-monthly account or can you do it on a Pay-as-you-go account? I'm reckoning some of you will have useful info on what is working for you as far as phones and networks that do SSH, and your experiences in practice. Happy New Year to all!"
Idokorro offers SSH clients for most J2ME phones, including the various blackberry devices, and also offers one for the Nokia phones with the flip-over keyboard (can't remember the model number). Try Idokorro
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
..is a voice-to-tcp converter. How quickly can you recite IP headers btw?
There's a puTTY client for the series 60 mobile phones, and it certainly works over Australia's Optus mobile network.
Hello. My name is google, I have answers for you.r ceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=ut f-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:officia l
http://www.google.com/search?q=cell+phone+ssh&sou
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
My pingtime is 600ms over GPRS and 200ms over UMTS. I've seen it bounce upto 2000ms with boats on the water in NY and not loose a ping.
Myself, I'm using my UMTS Motorola A845 phone as a usb modem, I can still take calls while I vpn and ssh out. Gives me about 3 hours combo surf/talk time before I need to charge, so I leave it plugged in at my desk while I do both.
Nice thing, no matter how much filtering IT does, I just route out over my phone connection... BTW, jerks are filtering some slashdot urls.
Also, While those GPRS phones are only Voice or Data at once, UMTS lets me do both at the same time, I dont have to quit my data session. I havnt tried the bluetooth, but been wanting to see how my pocketpc can ssh out while im on the phone.
UMTS is great, glad that its starting to go nation wide. DO and VO products just are not what you want.
...and talking loudly, I quite often say "SSH" :-)
and then they glare at me. Is that what you meant?
Get a Danger Hiptop from T-Mobile. You turn it on and it just works. It supports web browsing, E-mail with push, AIM, SMS, a regular cell phone, a transparently web-synchronized organizer, some games, a VGA camera, Yahoo Messenger, and SSH (plus several more applications that I haven't tried). You also get an E-mail address and web-based access to your data. Also, the keyboard is the most usable among all the devices I have tried.
The device is $200 and you pay $20/month for unlimited data services. You have to add a voice plan to that; the cheapest is another $10/month, making the device $30/month (1 year commitment).
The Orange pay as you go GPRS "extra" seems to allow all ports.
I've used SSH and IRC and AIM and others over it with no problem (apart from the hideous latency mentioned by others). This is with a Zaurus SL-5500 and a T68. The guy at the support desk who I asked before I got it said that I wouldn't be able to unless I was contract, he lied :-P.
One thing to watch out for if you use linux is that the networks (at least orange and t-mobile) ignore LCP echo requests, which makes your connection time out after 2.1 minutes unless you tell the pppd to forget about those.
I've had friends who tried O2 pay as you go GPRS and found it to be strictly limited to a port 80 proxy server.
There are multiple SSH clients for the Pocket PC platform, at least one of which is based on the popular PuTTY Win32 client. Also, many newer PPC phones, such as the iPaq 6315 and iMate PDA2K, include built-in WiFi, which can save you a bit on GPRS costs.
I am a heavy user of ssh over gprs (or gsm where gprs is not available):
:-)
I usually don't need/want a laptop when I am traveling so I initially went the PDA+cellphone way.
I have used my old Zaurus SL-5000D with a bluetooth CF-card and a triband SonyEricsson cellphone (T68i, then T630) to ssh into my european servers from Europe (UK, Italy, NL), the US (NYC, LA), Asia (HK, Cambodia, Thailand) and even from Japan, using a rented blutooth-enabled cellphone.
It has always worked flawlessly. I never had any problem with blocked 22 port or anything like that in any of these countries.
I considered the Treo 600 very seriously, but I will stick to my current PDA+cellphone solution. In Japan the Treo would be as useless as my Sony-Ericsson. But it is a lot easier to rent a simple bluetooth-enabled cellphone and use my usual PDA than it would be to rent an integrated local smartphone with an ssh client.
For the networks questions, there are more problems : if the cost is not important (company paid for instance), just use the roaming partners of your cellphone company : the big european players (Vodafone, Orange, T-mobile) usually try to have at least one partner allowing data in every country (be it over gprs or gsm). But it is expensive, and the costs are very difficult to predict. So if you want to optimize, you have to buy pay-as-you-go plans in every country, being careful to choose plans allowing data. You usually have to pay a premium for data but it is a lot cheaper than simply roaming.
The biggest problem then becomes to choose the right simcard from you (huge) collection depending on the place where you are. It can sometimes be tricky like : So I am in Cambodia near the Thailand border and I don't have any Cambodian pay-as-you-go plan. Choices are using my 12Call simcard because i am not far from Thailand and I can see their network from here, or using my SmarTone simcard, roaming through a local network to HongKong, or simply use the local roaming partner of my european network. Which one would be the cheapest??? The answer, found by trying, was using my HongKong pay-as-you-go plan (SmarTone). Please don't ask me why.
Just my two euro-cents.
I use a Nokia 6820 with ATT Wireless/Cingular. It has a fold out keyboard which is quite nice. ATT/Cingular both have unlimited data plans for around $20/mo. ATT Wireless charges extra for data usage by a device hooked up to the phone (Bluetooth, data cable -> laptop) but Cingular does not.
When I need to use SSH and don't have my laptop, I use MIDP SSH, which is free and "good enough." Ideally I'd wish for a bigger screen only. (From your cellphone: http://www.xk72.com/wap)
I've found mobiledia.com's forums to be quite helpful also.
Gabriel Ricard
My setup: T-Mobile w/ "Unlimited Internet", Nokia 3660, Palm Zire 72 (bluetooth to phone).
I've used both the Symbian PuTTY port and various palm SSH apps. They work, but there are some significant problems:
-Latency is huge (I've seen over 2000ms). You'd better type it correctly the first time.
-Input is difficult, particularly when you need non-alphanumberic characters (pipe, braces, escape, control characters). You'll want to figure this out before you need it.
-For the above reasons, you may want to think about something with a small keyboard. Still, remember that the little keyboard is still going to be short on keys. Figure out how to enter the "missing" characters.
-You don't get a "real" IP address. It's a 10.x.x.x address going through a NAT. Be sure that any firewalls or admin tools can cope with that.
-The battery drain for this is pretty significant. I get about two hours total use. That's fine for quick fixes, but you won't want to stay logged in to watch an hours-long database rebuild.
-Given the odd screen size and intermittent connectivity, screen will become your best friend.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
I've recently hooked myself up with a similar set-up, and have recently been writing about it in my journal. I'll detail it a bit here.
Here's what I'm running:
How everything is connected:
So far, this is a set-up I'm quite pleased with. The only way it could be better were if the Tungsten C supported Bluetooth as well as 802.11b.
I can't recommend Bluetooth highly enough for this sort of connectivity either. So long as I'm within 10m of the phone, I can connect to it from the laptop. And Mac OS X's Bluetooth support is excellent -- I'm able to synchronize my contact list and calendar, transfer files back and forth, send and receive SMS messages from my desktop, dial phone numbers, and connect to the internet -- all without wires, or any set-up hassle.
SSH has been important for me, as one of my primary uses for this sort of connectivity will be CVS source repository access through SSH.
I've only had the phone for a week, but I'm quite pleased with it in general. I could have done without the camera portion I suppose (the resolution and quality is terrible), but might come in handy for something someday.
Overall, the set-up appears to be working well, and I'm as pleased as punch with it. Everything is nicely portable, and I have instant access everywhere I go. Set-up has been a snap, and everything works as expected. Now if only I could get cable modem speeds out of this set-up, I'd never work at a desk ever again :).
Yaz.
There's an intrinsic issue with GPRS. GSM is a time-division system with eight slots - the phone encodes voice, then sends it out in a burst during it's slot, and reverses the process to receive. This puts about 1/4s delay in, which doesn't matter for voice unless you're on a conf call with one of the other parties in direct hearing range.
GPRS was a simple, cheap and technically conservative upgrade to GSM to send packet data in unused time slots. This introduces the latency: you have to wait for the slot, and if you have a large packet it will be fragmented into more than one slot. UMTS (3G) on the other hand was designed for data from the start, so no time division.
Another consideration if you are roaming is that your data will usually be tunnelled back to an GGSN (a router) in the home network which hosts the APN you are using. This can add some latency for general Internet use. There is some capability to tunnel to an APN in the visited network, but I don't know of any networks that actually do this as it would require more cooperation between the home and visited networks. More importantly, the APN is the point at which the home network can add "value added services", e.g. optimisation of HTML, so they usually see a justification for looping the user plane data back home, and would prefer to pay for the international bandwidth to do this.