[Gllug] Net access everywhere

[Richard Cohen]

On Thu, 30 May 2002 tet at accucard.com wrote:

>
> Does anyone have any experience of portable net access? What I'm
> thinking of is a palmtop type device with some kind of GPRS connectivity.
> The basic premise being an ability to do support should I get called
> while I'm not at home with access to my DSL line. All I need is a semi
> usable keybaord, and an ssh client.
>
> Have those of you with an iPAQ or Zaurus been able to do anything like
> this? Are there any pros and cons to partiuclar hardware? Any pitfalls
> I should be looking out for?

I've done this kind of thing on and off for years...  More often for
personal stuff (checking mail, /. - things like that), but it's the same
principle.

I've tended to use a mobile with a built-in modem (I think a few still have
soft modems) and IRDA, and dial up to a normal ISP - Freeserve, at the
moment.  All you really need for the PDA is something with a decent (size
and quality) screen, decent input, and enough CPU to run SSH - I used to use
my Palm, but the screen is really too small, and it wasn't really powerful
enough to do ssh, so I was doing telnet.  I can get a 59x24 xterm up on my
iPAQ, and it's plenty powerful enough for ssh...

You probably don't need GPRS for this - you can use it if you want, but GPRS
is really better for always-on, low traffic, rather than something bursty
like remote support.  Most (all?) phones can do 14.4K if you're on Orange,
and you can get phones which will do 28.8k at the cost of two bonded (at the
GSM level) calls.  Non-Orange networks will only give you 9.6K...

You may want a keyboard, in which case there are various types available for
Palms and iPAQs, but I've found in a few years that although I have two Palm
keyboards, I rarely used them - I've done various things with my mobile
devices over the years, including connecting to the company VPN (through a
gateway box), logging into a build machine, checking build logs, editing
files in our source tree and firing off another build.  screen rocks for
this, of course :-)

> We've got provisional buyin from management to splash out on toys like
> this, so I'd like opinions from anyone that's done it already...

I'd suggest an iPAQ - if you've got the budget, a 3870 will do bluetooth,
which is nicer than IRDA.  If you want bluetooth or HSCD (Orange's 28.8K
system), that will cut down your choice of phones quite a lot - I'm not 100%
sure there are *any* phones which support both, but otherwise, pick your
features, do the research... :-)

> Tet

Cheers
Richard


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