The introduction of the smartphone has changed the way we live our lives. With instant communications, and thousands of applications to enhance our daily routines, the mobile phone is now an ever-present companion to most of us. But did you know that it also has the capability to notify you when your network is down and can give you out of band management access in the form of CLI.
Failover to Cellular can work together with SmartOOBTM technology to notify you immediately at the first sign of an issue. This instant notification allows you to quickly take action as a network administrator to prevent a failure. Administrators can also leverage the SMS capabilities of your smartphone and Opengear cellular enabled devices to change the configuration on the fly such as raising the cellular connection.
However, your smartphone is not only limited to providing you notifications of a problem. It can also be used as a tool to access your network to resolve the issue when you are unable to access a computer. If you’re out of the office and maybe can’t locate a good WiFi connection for your laptop, traditional out of band access can be difficult. One option is to load up a web browser to enable Opengear’s web interface and try to resolve the issue this way on your phone. However, this may not be the preferable method since many network administrators prefer using CLI.
Now, by installing a shell client, you can use CLI on your phone. Applications like Termux for Android give you the command line interface you know and love. By utilizing CLI commands on your phone it’s one less thing you’ll need to figure out when you are quickly fixing a problem. Besides setting up the program you’ll need to set up an SSH client to ensure you have a secure connection to your Opengear device. The best part is that almost any type of cellular connection would work regardless if you are on 4G or edge and requires very little bandwidth to operate.
In this video, you’ll see how you can quickly and securely turn off and on your remote equipment with minimal effort and all from your smartphone.
Apple said it best, “There’s an App for that”.
