Thanks for the useful additional info on the server/wireless designs.
Sounds very feasible. especially since ssh is (usually) able to redirect itself
to any port desires, including 80, so that it's useable in firewall and proxy
environments. And yes, the slowness and cost are irrelevant if it's able to
function enough to just send a few commands at a time. i had rigged up qmail
to respond to emails to send me emails back (depending upon the command email I
sent). For example:
sent email TO: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
would (after verifying the pgp key) execute a command on the server to restart
the the specific https process for the bv3 site on websrv3. This "works" but
requires a lot of extra software (at least qmail) and preconfiguration, and
sometimes, if something goes awry, I can't tell what happened (I created
diagnostic commands too, but somtimes there just isn't anything better than
being on the command line, even if it's slow and basic). Plus it's too
dependent on email servers that it has to jump to/from to get to/from my palm's
email, and the delay is usually many minutes, and sometimes, dozens of minutes
during peak periods of email servers out there.
So you can see why just being able to direectly ssh/telnet to the box and being
able to directly execute short scripts would help significantly. Please do
keep the ideas coming, it sounds like it might pique at least some interest in
others out there.
Thanks very much for the feedback too.
-Hawke
On Thu, 04 Nov 1999, you wrote:
> >...if the web browser and email (and other) apps
> >are able to resolve IP addresses, and receive (and send) data to machines that
> >only understand that kind of data (IP), I find it very unlikely that it's
> >"impossible" to acheive the tasks I've described.
>
> Palm VII devices send their communications through a proxy server which
> connects the BellSouth network (i.e. the wireless net used by current Palm
> VII devices) to the internet. That proxy (currently) only does http and
> https, so other communications protocols really are not possible through
> that route.
>
> So it isn't a technical impossibility, but would require changes to the
> device as well as to our server to accomplish, since it certainly wasn't
> the design goal of the product. Right now there's no way to get there from
> here through our proxy on any protocol other than http.
>
> Hmm, now that my mind is going in more creative directions, one could do
> some interesting hacks, putting a http shim server on your own machine,
> which spoke http to the device and interfaced that with telnet doing
> line-by-line or something... again it'd be slow and expensive, but if as
> you say it'd prevent $10,000 a minute downtime, lots of unreasonable things
> become reasonable :-) Generic tty lives again... anyone want to take a
> stab at it?
>
> -David Fedor
> Palm Developer Support
--
Senior Systems Admin Mgr
Java and Internet Developer
Solaris, Linux, & Web Admin
MCSE, MCP+I, CNA, AS in CS
Electronic Solutions Division
Franklin Covey
