I do have a confession to make. It’s not a confession that should require the services of the clergy, but a lot of people have been surprised when I’ve told them about it.

I have an iPad.

There are lots of good arguments against it becoming the ubiquitous computing platform, however as a standalone interface, I’ve found it to be a pretty good tool that’s useful in more ways than I imagined before I bought it.

Honestly, one of the ways that it has surprised me is how useful it is in meetings. If I needed to research something, I’d have to do it on a laptop. Then if I wanted to show someone, I’d turn the laptop around, and it would be on the screen. Now, with the iPad, I hand it to them. It seems like such a small insignificant difference, but there’s a visceral change when you hold a piece of information in your hands literally. It has both literal and figurative weight.

Of course, if it were just a web browser, it would be a novelty. The key is that you can install apps on it. Yes, there are lots of problems with the app store (and their app approval methods), and a lot of the apps in the store are rubbish, but there are some gems in there as well.

Deep down at the very bottom of my sysadmin heart, I’m pragmatic. If something works, I use it. If not, I don’t. The iPad works for what I use it for, so I use it. Also, I absolutely love Harbor Master.

So aside from web browsing, what can the iPad do for us in our job roles? As it turns out, quite a lot, provided we abide by some ground rules that are enforced by the limitations of the device.

No tactile keyboard The resolution is fixed. The only VPN access on the iPad is for a Cisco ASA-series SSL VPN.

That last one is the killer for me. It essentially means that I can only use the tools on my iPad while I’m at work. Lots of people have the Cisco hardware and licenses to make the VPN work, though, and there are a decent number of people doing business on the public cloud, in which case the tools may be handy. If so, great! Just be warned about what you’re up against.

So now that you know whether or not you can use the apps, what apps should you get? There are tons. Over 250,000. Lots of them are crap, though. Even ignoring the stupid fart apps, what makes a sysadmin-related app good? In my mind, there are a few things to look for.

It doesn’t see itself as the center of the world It doesn’t do things wholly unfit for a mobile device If you’re going to pay for an app, make sure it does something worth paying for

There are some apps that I’ve installed and use, and there are others that people have recommended to me on twitter. I can’t personally speak for all of them, but they sound useful and good for the most part. Several of them do similar things, so I’ll try to group them by utility.

Remote Access (terminal)

iSSH is the gold standard for remote terminal apps. It includes “VT100, VT102, VT220, ANSI, xterm, and xterm-color terminal emulator over SSH and telnet, integrated with a tunneled X server and VNC client”. Say it with me…”that’s hot”.

The existence of good terminal emulators hasn’t stopped people from solving specialized problems, sometimes very cleanly. MyRouters Pro, for instance, simplifies logging in to your Cisco routers and devices. It supports multiple concurrent connections and also macros. Interesting sounding software!

Remote Access (GUI)

Desktop Connect is a pretty smooth looking single pane of glass for RDP and VNC. At $15, it’s expensive, but not as expensive as solutions like iTap RDP and iTap VNC, each of which are $12.

Coming in at $15 as well is the Wyse PocketCloud Remote Desktop. It seems to be the market leader, in terms of remote desktop solutions, and from the screenshots, you can see why. The unique mouse pointer menu system looks handy, and while I haven’t shelled out money for one of these solutions yet, if I did, it would be for this one.

As far as I can tell, LogMeIn Ignition is a remote desktop solution, but only for Macs. I was under the mistaken impression that LogMeIn Ignition was Mac-only, but it has been pointed out to me that this is not the case. In fact, according to commenter Dan, the pro version includes some pretty sweet Windows-specific things, too. Check out the user guide for more details.

Remote Control

Sometimes, all you want is to control the screen in front of you. Having a keyboard and mouse on your couch is bulky and uncomfortable. Having one for every machine attached to a NOC display may not be possible. The software I use for my media-PC-sans-keyboard-and-mouse problem is Mobile Mouse. Essentially, it lets the iPad function like a giant touchscreen, and it works great. At $3, it’s slightly cheaper than the other option I found out about, creatively called touchpad, which costs $5.

Service & Solution Administration

Citrix caught on to the remote desktops pretty quickly and wrote Citrix Receiver to fill the need for an iPad app to access your network-based machines simply.

If you’ve got a Rackspace server (or several), you may already know about Rackspace Cloud Pro, an app that allows you to manage your servers and storage.

I don’t run Mac servers anymore. They’re too…well…weird, for my tastes (at least, the old headless Xserve compute nodes we had were). If I did still run macs, You can bet that I’d have this app. It’s Server Admin Remote, which manages the services as though you were sitting at the administrative console in Server Manager.

Troubleshooting

UDP Tools is a cool idea. It’s sort of like a graphical netcat which only does UDP. There’s also one for TCP, but that’s called “telnet” ;-)

syslogger is a tool which allows you to send a syslog message to the syslog server of your choice. It only speaks UDP, but assuming you’ve got syslog listening for remote connections, you can spit out messages at it from your iPad using this.

I’m not usually a fan of crappy visual traceroute programs. They’re typically kludgy, buggy, and most of the apps cost money for something that is, in all reality, pointless. Vtrace, however, is at least free. So if you like maps with dots and lines, try this one.

Monitoring & Security

The aforementioned touchmon is an iPhone app for checking the statuses reported by a Nagios server. It doesn’t require any modifications to the Nagios server itself. It seems to just scrape the html and interpret the statuses itself, so if you’ve customized your CGIs, it probably won’t work, but it seems pretty handy otherwise.

iStat should be included just for the interface. It’s a way to see the stats of a remote machine at a glance, and it’s pretty. Unfortunately it also requires installation of a monitoring program, so it’s probably not worth it.

If you run network-based security cameras, there’s at least a decent chance that they’re by Axis. If they are, then you, too, can feel like you’re on CSI with the Viewer for Axis Cameras. I don’t have any of these, so I don’t have this program, but I imagine that it allows you to view as many cameras as you’ve got. If you hear anything different (or you try it out) let me know!

Aanval, which connects to an Aanval server, which performs snort & syslog IDS.

iCacti Server Monitor is about all I can ask for in a an app, aside from the $4 price tag. It connects to an existing monitoring server, displays graphs clearly and cleanly, and has real value in displaying trends to people in meetings.

Reference & Information Management

The Omnigraffle app is probably going to be the most expensive on this list at $50, but if you make diagrams (and you have a Mac with Omnigraffle), it’s absolutely worth it. You can share diagrams and stencils from the full Mac version, and being able to organize your thoughts on the ipad is great. The interface is complex, because there are so many options, and it takes a while to get the hang of it, but the reward is worth the time spent.

Evernote is a great piece of software for organizing those bits of information that you’d otherwise jot down on napkins or spare bits of paper, or whatever you’ve got with you. Since your computer can’t follow you around, the iPhone and iPad are natural extensions of this software. The best part is that your notes are synced everywhere, so if you make a note on your iPad, when you get back to your computer, it’s there too. Very handy.

dhcp-options provides on-the-fly reference of all of the dhcp options available, and what they mean.