Back a hundred years ago I used to use my trusty Newton MessagePad 2000 for network support. Armed with a serial cable and a Farallon Ethernet card, I was able to telnet into switches, routers and servers. Add in a modem and it was a mobile email solution for wherever I was. It lightened my load considerably and was considerably easier to use than the company-provided Dell Latitude. The battery life difference (8 hours versus the Dell’s 45 minutes) also made it an easy decision. I also had the external keyboard and, placing it behind the screen on a flight made for an extremely ergonomic writing position. On a 3 hour flight, it was possible to be working for almost the duration of the flight. Not possible with the Dell.
I was therefore somewhat delighted to try out Mocha Telnet Lite, from the guys who brought the first VNC app to the App Store. It bright back a lot if memories considering my iPhone is more powerful than my Dell laptop was (and has more RAM, more storage) while being about a third of the size if the MessagePad.
The UI is easy to pick up and is as good looking as you could expect from an application designed to provide telnet/command line access to a computer.
Sadly all of my servers but one have switched off telnet access so I’ve only really had the chance to use it to test some SMTP server settings.
Looking forward to Mocha SSH!