Smartphones For Text SSH Use Re-Revisited

Kainaw writes "This was asked in 2005 and 2008. I think it should be revisited yet again... With iPhone, Android, and Windows smartphones running around, which (if any) of them are well-suited to Unix/Linux server administration on the run? SSH is a must. A good screen resolution. A physical keyboard won't block the screen with a virtual keyboard. Many physical keyboards omit the numeric keys now, making the typing of numbers rather difficult. Nearly every smartphone has WiFi capability now. Some will do an X display through SSH tunnelling. So, pushing through all the bells and whistles that have nothing to do with effective server administration, what is left?"

Comments

Re:The N900.

[CRCulver]

I agree. I regularly use the N900 for SSH sessions with several servers. It runs Debian, so there's no much of a learning curve. There's a physical keyboard that you can easily remap for your own purposes.

HTC MyTouch 3G Slide works OK

[rwa2]

I'm fairly happy with my cheap-ass HTC Slide running CyanogenMOD . You can get them for about half the price of the big expensive Android phones.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/migrating-to-android-for-palm-linux.html

Keyboard pic

The ConnectBot SSH client can do port forwarding, so you can set up a secure tunnel for androidVNC (which is probably better than X forwarding as far as maintaining persistent sessions across mobile networks go). The phone supports T-mobile HSDPA network, which can give you noticeably lower latency than EDGE / GPRS, and near-DSL speeds. Your ssh sessions stay connected in the background until you tell them to disconnect, and the keyboard is pretty comfortable to use.

Some random notes:

• + Terminal with default font is 80x25!
• + the trackpad button is the Ctrl key, hitting it twice sends the Esc key. Works great with screen.
• - no cursor buttons, and the trackpad can be quite finicky when trying to send several l/r u/d
• - the HTC Slide uses the older ARMv6 cpu, so no 3D-intensive apps like Google Earth Mobile or high-end games. Other than that, it runs everything fine
• - sending some special characters in ConnectBot can be a chore, such as pipes and < > ... need to call up the softkeyboard for those, by first closing the physical keyboard, tapping on the softkeyboard icon, then calling up the "num" then "alt" keyboard :-/ . Probably better to make aliases for your often-used command strings. But that's something that could be remedied in software, hopefully... ConnectBot doesn't appear to use the physical Symbol key well.

Re:iPhone with iSSH

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of physical keyboard did you not understand? Carrying around a BT keyboard is hardly on the run now is it. He obviously wants to react to issues where ever he is, and not look like a typical ipadder cruising the local coffee shops.

Re:The N900.

[Skal Tura]

Uhm, generally speaking you do not want to do any complex things or coding with your phone unless it's an emergency... In which case, as long as it can do it somewhat conveniently it's really OK.

Anything requiring more than a few simple commands, i'll find a real computer.