AWS micro instances for personal & learning use

Too much money, too much downtime. That sums up my experience with my web hosting company over the last couple years. My shared hosting account costs about $120/year, and sure didn’t feel like I was getting my money’s worth. Due to ridiculous email downtime and failing SSL certs I moved email services to Google apps …

SSH to an AWS EC2 server from an iPhone

The first round of SSH clients for the iPhone presented some problems when connecting to Amazon Web Services EC2 Linux server instances. EC2 instances require a private certificate key file to be used to authenticate to the server during an SSH session. This lead to some workarounds where one had to export the iPhone’s key …

IT service administration apps on the iPhone

Stuff breaks. Usually when I’m nowhere near a computer. These 4 apps help keep me sane: 1. Jaadu Remote Desktop (app store link). Pricey, but the best RDP client of the bunch. This plus the built in iPhone VPN client and I can access all of our Windows based servers. 2. Citrix Receiver (app store …

Can my iphone replace my laptop for travel?

Over the last few years I have been traveling with my ultralight laptop. I’ve always enjoyed having a movie available, or leeching off random wifi to stay in contact and look up information while traveling.  Even though it is lightweight and small, it was still too much for my liking.  This last trip I tried …