Not remote enough

It’s not often that I completely take a day off from working. Seems there is always some little thing that needs attention, whether it’s testing out some new code, checking stats, responding to email, or addressing some sort of issue. Well, today wasn’t one of those days off, but if ya gotta work, there are worse places to be when working.

I was out for a hike near my house with our dog Django (no relation to the web framework, but some relation to Django Reinhardt), when I received an alert from our server monitoring system. Nothing critical, but it was something that needed to be addressed before it became critical. Perched on the nearest rock, I pulled out my Treo 650 (I’m not going to upgrade until I can get a Linux based Palm device), which has pssh installed. The signal is not great around here, but usable, so I was able to access the server in our data center, correct the issue, and continue our walk. This photo, taken with that same Treo, was my view from that rock after receiving the “recovery” alert. (Django is pretty patient with server alerts.)

Makes me wonder just how remote I can go, with the fewest and smallest devices, and still be effective. Not many look at this site, but I’m interested in any thoughts or comments regarding minimal tools used to work remotely in a technology related position. Sure, a laptop makes it easy. Let’s go smaller.