What a great pair of gems I found last night for my BlackBerry.
When I am away form the office I use a BlackBerry 7100v [i] to receive my pages, e-mails, calls, etc. The device has proven to me to be indispensable .. but last weekend I found myself needing something it didn’t had .. SSH.
I was sitting on a Cafe when I got paged one of my server’s FTP was down, I knew that server’s FTP service sometimes requires a simple restart,, and I wished I had SSH right there and then, so I didn’t had to send a mail out too a tech to do it for me, another option was, if I had AIM/ICQ I could just ask one of the tech that works with me to do it,, and not need to wait for the email to reach somebody … it was not to be.
So I decided to look around,, see if this device could do SSH .. and boy,, does it ever ::)
I found Idokorro SSH [i] for the Blackberry .. costs only 99$ and it does both SSH 1 & 2 as well as Telnet,, it also has true ANSI and VT100 modes .. I installed the trial and after fiddling with the BlackBerry settings to Activate TCP/IP direct mode, it worked !!, (BTW,, for Vodafone UK TCP settings are: APN: Internet, User: web, Password: web).
The screenshot doesn’t make it justice .. the letters are very clear and legible (thanks to the superb display the 7100v has), but the camera blurred it out .. so I tried to SSH to a server and restart proftpd .. and it did just that 🙂
SSH on all it’s glory
Once I got that going, I decided to do some more digging,, what else is available for this thing I tough .. the answer .. Verichat [i].
Verichat allows me to have always on (thank you BlackBerry) AIM, yahoo, MSN and ICQ .. great feature to have on those long Train rides when you suddenly need to talk to somebody on one of those protocols.
Now I can chat on the Loo
I was surprised how nice it works, the chat is instantaneous like on a normal internet connection,, and it can run in the background, when somebody sends you a message, a warning pops up with a sound alert, so you can reply .. just great .. and at about 30$ per annum, a bargain 🙂
So now I am now looking for more goodies that can make my life easier on the Blackberry .. and to think it only costed me 50£ 😉