System administration with a cell phone
System administration is not my idea of fun. Nevertheless, operating our own servers means freedom to run whatever we want to. In addition, I believe it's less work to operate our own servers than negotiating what can be installed with central services. And finally, someone else does most of this work at TECFA. I only administer portalware and machines I am using a lot (e.g. edutechwiki). That way I understand the issues and can fix problems if there is an emergency.
I went to my usual fairly Internet-free three week summer vacation and only took my cell phone. I then checked in every two days for spams and other incidents. One day, EdutechWiki wouldn't display the "recent changes" page, giving an obscure SQL runtime error. One solution would have been to call up some other person to investigate, but I decided to do it on my own. Took me a few hours since I had to install a remote ssh client on my phone and then I made a stupid mistake, i.e. I started repairing tables instead of checking the overall system state. My typing skills on a cell phone are low, really low, and I went straight for the error instead of thinking and typing some more...
Morale: Before you leave on vacation,
- Install Connectbot on your Android. Modulo the limitations of a cellphone virtual keybord, Connectbot is a really good client. You only need to learn how to enter CTRL characters and such. Read the help. Btw. there are several SSH clients for Iphones, e.g. iSSH. On the Blackberry, try Midpssh.
- Make sure to have a "data roaming package", else you may get a huge bill. Fortunately I did contract a 200MB/84CHF one month plan from Swisscom before I left. Other operators now may offer similar plans. Anyhow, data roaming costs are ridiculous. Fortunately at least the EU has plans to crack down on this absurd situation.
- Clean up the root partition. There was a 10GB log file from the networker backup program and MySQL couldn't create temporary files. Found this by looking up the MySQL error code :(
- If not already done so, create a user with a not too complicated password. I couldn't manage to type in the root password in the short timespan allowed. After logging in as normal user, going su then doesn't have this limit.
