Usefulness of tablets in the System Admin world [closed]
So in my new job as System Admin, more and more I have been looking into tablets but I try to be a frugal person and justify my costs. One application I was attempting to think of was if I could use this thing on the job or not, which would increase it's value to me greatly. Now I'd rather this not turn into an opinion battle of apple vs android, etc but is there any practical use for tablets for this kind of job, and if so what apps make it worthwhile, what cost some money but are worth the cost? If any, of course. Or are these things more for family and entertainment purposes?
Solution 1:
Having worked in the same office as a bunch of tablets, their best use ended up being working during meetings. They're less obtrusive than that big laptop so you're not hiding behind a screen while you don't make eye-contact. Very handy for instantly troubleshooting trouble-reports that poke their head in the door ("Um, did you know printing is broken?"). I also know some people used them preferentially when dragging their butts to the other end of campus to meet with people or do things since a tablet is lighter than a laptop; and if it gets really serious they could just commandeer a desktop anyway.
The only admin who outright replaced their laptop with it was the Solaris admin, and even he preferred a real keyboard if he was doing anything more than hitting refresh on status pages. No one ever replaced their desktop with one, we were f-a-r too addicted to screen real-estate to consider that an option.
As for apps:
- Browser
- SSH client
Not much else. If our telecom folk picked them up (they never did that I saw) there are some wifi-analysis apps that are useful for troubleshooting wifi networks, but I don't know much about them.
Solution 2:
We use our iPads quite heavilly for on-call support. Here are three quick things we do with it:
-
vSphere remote administration. VMWare has a fairly good iPad client. It can do the important things on a VM that you need to do in an emergency, such as restart guests or hosts, and view utilisation
-
Dashboard overview of system health and network activity
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Remote desktop into servers for quick fixes. It's not great for working for extended periods, but for emergencies its quite good
This particular RDP client also supports TS gateways, which makes it even more useful.
Solution 3:
They are nice for the instant-on features. This makes them good as dashboards — if you can get a live overview of all your systems to fit on a single screen with one-click drill down that you can pull up in <3 seconds, there is some value there. They're also nice for reading through lots of documentation - you can take an 600 page manual with you and it's 1/4 the size and weight. Expanding on this a bit, imagine one in a server room with all the docs for your servers pre-loaded to the device and easy to get to for reference.
But don't expect to actually get work done with one, and so personally they haven't justified a $500 outlay yet.
I do use an iPod Touch + an app that's since been pulled from the store for using undocumented APIs as a quick and dirty way to do a poor-man's on-the-fly wifi site survey.