Saving the day, mobile-style

There must be some immutable law of physics that states that hardware only fails when it’s needed. This morning was one long panic caused by a failing wifi base station and a dodgy Cat 5 lead and a ropey Apache server; which meant that the only way I had of getting one of our websites back up was a Pocket PC and a Bluetooth phone.

And amazingly, it worked. The phone is a rather elderly Ericsson T39m, and the handheld a Dell Axim X3i. The neat bits are GPRS Manager, which takes all the hassle fun out of getting said T39m to talk to said Axim; and PocketPuTTY.

So the resolution went something like this: start up Bluetooth on the phone, then get GPRS Manager to connect to robbing bastards O2’s GPRS service. Use PocketPuTTY to bring up an SSH connection to the flakey server, and thirty seconds and a quick apachectl start later, all was well once more.

Ok, it’s hardly ground-breaking stuff; but the point it it worked, and what’s more, it worked under duress. Which hardly ever happens; there’s always something that goes wrong, and doubly-so when it involves phones and GPRS and things needing to happen ten minutes ago.

Filed under Geek |