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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?"
Hardware keyboard, ships with xterm, has easily accessible number keys, and no jailbreaking needed.
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Not sure about android, but MidpSSH works wonders on my Blackberry, they probably have an android version. Used it just last night in a bind!
Walk with Music;
I second this. I have been using ConnectBot and it works great on my HTC Desire. Just don;t leave connections running in the background... it drinks battery like it's going out of style when you do that.
http://bbssh.org/wiki/en/Home
The author just released 2.0 with huge improvements. I've been using it for nearly half a year now, previously on a Storm and now on a Torch. It's great, it even works well with things like screen and irssi. It's great being able to login to my servers remotely anywhere, check screen sessions and even if I want to hop on IRC if need be! For those familiar with MidpSSH this is basicly it on steriods, but done properly.
...and specifically the touch UI one for Symbian S60v5. It's PuTTy. Oh, you want an URL with that... Try http://bd.kicks-ass.net/koodaus/putty/
It runs real Linux with real root (out of the box). It has a real xterm and bash is installable. It runs xorg. It's a fantastic phone. However, it doesn't have separate number keys which can be a pain if you're typing a lot of numbers. A cool feature of the xterm is it puts Ctrl, Tab, Esc, PgUp, and PgDn on-screen to work with the physical keyboard. It's great for remote server administration. I wouldn't want to work on it all day, but it's not meant for that, either.
Life is short; think quickly.
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:
I can back this up. Here's my post I typed up before seeing this one:
I use a Nokia N900 and do this constantly. It comes preconfigured such that ctrl+shift+x starts an x term. I then just ssh in. I have a fairly fancy-pants password that uses various symbols, and it's easy to type it in with this phone. I can use vim comfortably on the phone (this was a problem with the android ssh tool i used because it didn't have an easily-accessible 'esc' key.)
The N900 runs debian. I can't imagine needing to say more.
-knewter
iPhone with iSSH by Zinger-Soft works great for me. You can use an external Bluetooth keyboard. Nice thing is, you can run the iPad version as well for the one price. www.zinger-soft.com
I believe MidpSSH is quite out of date, but Marc Paradise's BBSH is based on it, and it's a vast improvement.
Caveat Utilitor
ConnectBot on a Google Nexus One. It just works. You can configure the display to 40x23 or 42x24 or whatever font fits best on screen versus your desired font size. The trackball acts as a control key and alt key: one press = CTRL, double press = ALT. (a must for Emacs and vi users)
My only complaint is that it doesn't remember passwords the way AndFTP does (another excellent tool, by the way). I'd like to not have to type in the darned password every time, but oh well, it's a lot better than no ssh.
It's also kinda neat that you can view the scrollback simply by dragging the screen back. Why don't all computers work that way?
Last, and best of all, it's a free app. I haven't tried the other ssh clients out there, honestly, but since this one works, I haven't felt the need.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Honestly, if you SSH in a LOT using a phone will anger you a lot. I got a tiny netbook with a WWAN card (inside!)
Dell mini 10 with a pciE wwan card works great. and it is small enough to carry with me everywhere.
I'd end up killing people if I had to spend more that 30 seconds working in SSH on a phone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Amen.. ConnectBot is great. All the features and very little lameness or clutter.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
I'm barely awake and those popped right off my head. Either you've been fortunate enough to only have IT gigs where you weren't the only person running the servers, or you've never had anything go wrong. Either way, get your ass to Atlantic City while your luck is holding out.
Also, search for "full keyboard" on the market for a replacement software keyboard that gives lots of useful extra keys, such as a dpad and ctrl-key shortcuts (so you can type ^C with a single keypress)
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
Just prefix each command with :; and the capitalization problem goes away. At first that quirk used to drive me crazy, but there's no need to use a secondary console.
really? apart from the egregious mistake of not including a backtick on anything but one obscure email keyboard
Hold down the apostrophe key for a second or two, it pops up a number of different quotes, including the backtick.
are there phone hard keyboards out there that provide key punctuation (pipe, backtick, tilde, square/curly/angle brackets) in no more than two keypresses?
If you go for a N900 you can reconfigure the keyboard any way you want with XKB. Using Fn+key and Shift+Fn+Key for different symbols you should be able to fit anything you need.
I use ConnectBot on my Samsung Moment. Has a physical keyboard and works great, can do pubkey authentication, all the bells and whistles. Big thumbs up... ConnectBot is an extremely well-designed and open-source app.
My bicyles
A hard keyboard + ConnectBot make my Samsung Epic a good fit...
ConnectBot can open a port that your application can tunnel through. What I really want is a way to tunnel the browser and maybe even email on my android for when I am using a public insecure wifi point, but I haven't run across anything even remotely close....
http://www.toremote.com/ssh -Destructions for connect bot port forwarding
"DENIAL"-How an optimist keeps from becoming a pessimist- \ \
As mentioned elsewhere in these posts, give BBSSH a try. It does not have this annoying tendency. What you type in your blackberry keyboard is what you get and if you want to use caps you need to hold down the shift key just like a real keyboard. I cannot stress how amazing BBSSH is, once you start to really get use to it and learn about swipes (literally almost like gestures of a sorts) it's great and quickly I can use it almost as fast as a putty/xterm session.
It's a bit oldskool but the G1 keyboard has all the numbers on a separate row. A quick google image search shows a few other models with full keyboards too.
I use connectbot on my HTC Hero, but there are a few things that are somewhat annoying about it. First, I haven't got SSH Trusts working with it, which is kind of a big deal, since I'm paranoid enough to require the connecting device have its public key stored in the .ssh/authorized_hosts file on the SSH bastion host on my home network (although it hasn't been a big enough deal that I've spent a lot of time working on it). Second, since the Hero's virtual keyboard isn't a full 101-key keyboard, it's a bit clunky to do things like send an escape or CTRL-C character. It's possible, just a bit of a pain. Finally, every other app on the Hero allows you to press and hold a key on the keyboard to choose numbers or special characters, for example, press and hold the "t" key to type the number "5" or press and hold the "h" key to select an ampersand ("&"). Connectbot, for some obscure reason detects that as two key strokes. So, for example, if I try to type a quote character by pressing and holding the "x" key, connectbot detects an "x" and then a quote. As long as you are aware of the limitations and know how to work around them, connectbot is usable, just a bit clunky. Nevertheless, whenever possible, I prefer to do like someone else mentioned earlier and just tether a laptop to the phone so I can use a "normal" SSH client.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
I'm pretty sure you have never, ever done any real systems administration of any sort. For you to make uneducated, broad statements such as this...if I had mod points, I would mod you trolling. Having worked in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that there's been plenty of scenarios in which a smartphone with an SSH client was or would have been invaluable. When I'm on call, and I'm at a restaurant, and a critical service gets broken by someone and I need to intervene, a netbook or laptop aren't practicable.
My only complaint is that it doesn't remember passwords the way AndFTP does (another excellent tool, by the way). I'd like to not have to type in the darned password every time, but oh well, it's a lot better than no ssh.
I don't know that I would want it to remember passwords. What happens if you lose your phone, or if someone steals it? If Connectbot remembers your passwords, you've just given a complete stranger the keys to your kingdom. It's a bit of a PITA to type passwords on my Hero with Connectbot, but less so than changing all of the passwords on every system to which I connect were I to lose the phone somewhere.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Not only ssh, but sshfs and X forwarding. For the administration that requires a graphical interface, just pop it up on your N900 display. You can't beat that.
Not to mention OpenVPN works too.
Considering that OP asks for ssh, one might assume that he is from the Unix/Linux space, hence a Nokia N900 that is the ultimate hacker friendly phone makes sense.
The biggest issue I've found with the keyoard that you need Fn to enter digits, and the dot is Fn-less hence, entering IP addresses needs some getting used to.
Basically you are getting a ARM based Linux subsubsub notebook, with a X11 based UI that is appropiate for the size. And the form factor makes it a nice phone too.
Drawbacks:
-) the usual battery drain problem (basically if you are a power user you probably want to have a second charged pack at hand, a fully charged battery can be drained in 3 hours if you use it nonstop)
-) some stuff like MMS (who is willing to pay for that?) need 3rd party apps. Other nice stuff like a Wifi hotspot or Bluetooth tethering need to be installed from extras-devel.
-) default kernel comes without iptables, sigh.
Other goodies:
-) Firefox based default browser.
-) Very well done Skype integration.
-) The phone works well as an UMTS modem over USB (if you need to tether on the road for your laptop).
-) Terminal app, and trivial root access, hence you can play completely e.g. with the network stack as you need it. (My home setup is: N900 tethered via USB to my desktop, accessing the Internet via the desktop, with a VNC client on the desktop to control the N900. If the cable modem fails, the N900 still accesses the Internet via the desktop, but the desktop uses the N900 as it's fallback UMTS modem)
Virgin Mobile has a nice $25/month "Beyond Talk" deal for unlimited data and SMS and 300 minutes/month for voice (with higher priced plans if you use more voice), motto Go crazy on Android. It's prepaid if you want it to be, so it's nice that way. They only sell a single phone, the Samsung Intercept, but I've found it to be really nice for what I do: it's got a slide-out keyboard with a separate number row and with separate buttons per key (no membrane keyboard). I spend lots of time on SSH via ConnectBot and have found it to be pleasant to use.
It's not the most powerful processor and the resolution isn't mindblowing and it's still Android 2.1, but I run my terminal at 80x21 and am quite happy with it, especially for the price.
Connecting the Openmoko phones to your Linux computer provides ssh, charging and internet sharing (you can use your computer's internet this way which is quite useful to check installed programmes which require internet access, e.g. a web browser or an instant messaging programme). The usb port also supports host mode. The screen resolution is pretty good as well for phones that were released in 2007-2008 (480x640). The phones don't have a physical keyboard, but the virtual QWERTY keyboard used with a stylus is quite good.