Survival kit for the system administrator
15/11/2021
- Battery
- Central unit (Raspberry Pi)
- Screen (smartphone)
- Network (4G router)
- Keyboard
- Mouse
You can do almost everything with a smartphone… Almost, because for a system administrator, it particularly lacks the possibility of secure command-line access.
Sure, there are smartphone apps that emulate a terminal window, but in terms of security, they are junk. Moreover, an informed user will note that they obviously do not support SSH key connections, essential for acting on a server.
A solution illustrated by this survival kit is to use a Raspberry Pi as a central unit and, on a smartphone, visualize its display via a VNC client. A 4G router then allows both a local network for the VNC connection and Internet access.
The keyboard, connected via Bluetooth directly to the Raspberry Pi, allows confidential password entry: they thus escape the VNC stream (and, of course, they are not displayed in the terminal).
The mouse is optional but looks good.