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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

If your goal is a portable SSH client, even an original iPad mini with a bluetooth keyboard would be a better option than this thing.

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Did you read the text? The goal is not a portable SSH client, but a sort of traveling admin's Swiss army knife device, hence relatively small size (but large enough to host a keyboard), and a lot of ports. Isn't it obvious that iPad cannot conform to the requirements?

Did you read the post I replied to?

> And since your battery won't be large enough to support compiling LLVM in reasonable time anyway, it's better to just get used to do CPU-heavy stuff by ssh-ing to a rackmount somewhere use the laptop for terminal-ish tasks.

Nothing about that comment says anything to support your arbitrary narrowing of the device purpose.

Well, it does, and my comment does start with IF your goal is....

If your goal IS NOT that, then clearly what I suggested isn't going to be applicable is it?

Indeed, it did seem totally inapplicable to the thread.

I wrote that. And the reason that I didn't go into connectivity/port issues is that they have almost nothing to do with battery lifetime. I saw no reason to digress into those topics.

I've been using iSH on the iPhone for my portable SSH client, it works pretty great for server maintenance even with the on-screen keyboard.

https://github.com/tbodt/ish

I use Prompt these days, but iSSH's Remote Desktop client was super useful back when I was doing admin work and didn't have the luxury of never needing to work on a Windows server!

As I recall, I also used its X server for remote display from an OpenGenera instance running on a Tru64 VM, back when I was still indulging my hobby for Lisp system archaeology, and network problems were stopping me displaying to the VM host's X server. Good times...

iphone lacks vital hardware, it has no keyboard.

lacking a keyboard is abysmal productivity vs being able to type and do key combinations.

try using stuff like vim/emacs or byobu/screen on an iphone, try to select and middle click to copy/paste, or any of the key combination we use all the time in the shell.

no keyboard = no go.

uhnn no?

Where is the serial ports etc

What is the purpose of a serial port, If your goal is a portable SSH client?

Plenty of enterprise grade hardware (I'm looking at Cisco) provide telnet access over a serial interface - which is dead handy when the thing is running but stops responding to SSH connections.

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