SSH over VPN on the iPhone - Why Not?

Recently, Nigel Poulton tweeted a YouTube video that showcased an application to manage the Xsigo I/O Directors from the iPhone... I responded that, at one time, I had done something 'similar' using SYMCLI and SSH.  He posted a followup discussing whether or not an iPhone admin function is something that Enterprise customers would be comfortable with:

While I think the idea is cool, I’m not sure how interested companies would be –> management and configuration changes to production kit from an iPhone ….. sounds a bit ahead of its time to me.   Cool, yes.  But is cool what major companies and managers of large Data Centres are looking for?  Remember that Xsigo kit is pretty squarely pitched at enterprise customers.  Would such applications cause more worries and concerns than they would solve problems?

I don't think anyone would argue that administering any sort of production kit primarily using an iPhone is a good idea.  But certainly most IT folks have had production situations arise where they're away from a computer and just need to check a few things out quickly.  This type of software is perfect for that.  In any case, it is optional software, so if a given customer has an issue with providing this type of access then they can simply not deploy this interface.

Think about it this way……. Matt Davis pinged me back saying that he had once done “symcli over ssh over VPN ….. via my iPhone” to administer a Symmetrix DMX!!  Not sure what your initial thoughts are on hearing that, but mine were trepidation.  Sure, that’s pretty damn cool, but pretty flipping scary too!  Kudos to Matt, but more scary than cool in my books

More scary than cool?  In my opinion, not really.

1. GNU Screen provides protection against connection hiccups.  If the VPN or SSH connection drops in the middle, I can re-attach the terminal as it was running.
2. I've written perl scripts around the majority of changes... as part of these scripts, they generate 'undo scripts' that can easily revert any changes to the way they were previously.
3. I'm extremely familiar with SYMCLI (to the point that I tend to know more than the support people I work with) and I would only ever run processes I was comfortable with via this type of connection.  I'm enough of a geek that I have the entire Solutions Enabler PDF collection synced to my iPhone via DropBox (along with Cisco documentation and other array documentation). 
4. I would never run any procedure that would generate a lock on the array or take a long time to run.  But some symdev or symmaskdb queries?  Readying a device or kicking off a symrcopy command?  Why not?

I could argue that this method is more stable than most Web interfaces since it isn't subject to JVM crashes and browser hangs.  As with most CLIs, you need to know exactly what you are doing though.  A little knowledge and root access is a dangerous thing.