The 2 iPhone apps we need

Our “enterprise” must be somewhat unique; for us enterprise has nothing at all to do with Exchange. (We use simple IMAP and Mail.app, and the excellent Daylite for contacts, calendars, etc. )

For us there are 2 killer apps for our phones, and sadly I fear one of them will be impossible:

1, a reasonable amount of access to unix-y bits, in particular ssh. Being able to perform simple maintenance while on-the-go will be such a massive “force multiplier” for us that the phones will almost pay for themselves, in terms of no longer tethering the person on-call to their internet connection at home.

I see no reason why there won’t be 50 different competing SSH terminal apps out the day the App Store goes live. So that’s good.

2, we need a modification to the SMS app to allow it to act like a traditional pager; that is to say, “when an SMS comes in, keep making goddamn noise every few seconds until someone comes over and does something”. Like, oh, just about everyone we use Nagios (and I’ve started rolling out monit for stuff, too) to check status on machines. Machine go boom, nagios pages oncall@.

At 2am, that would be a quarter-second-long “boop” on a phone across the room, and maybe you had an extra glass of wine too many that night, and are sleeping a little more soundly than usual…

I am assuming at this point that it means we’ll need to go and buy a traditional pager: before with our shit RAZRs, you just set the most obnoxious ringtone available to incoming SMS, and it worked great. Well, except you dread that sound …

Anyway the “no background apps” rule seems to preclude anyone from writing a better SMS app.

So we’re stuck with maintaining a second cell account, or buying a physical pager. Or hacking our phones, which I sorta refuse to do. (FFS, I refuse to use input managers or any other hacks, you think I’m going to sysadmin my phone???)

It’s sort of sad to think, one day I’ll be restarting a troublesome httpd process one day, from my phone in the dark of a movie theatre, after my stupid numeric pager went off …