What is a Unix sysadmin doing with an iPhone, you ask? It was a birthday present, if that’s all right with you. I know, I should have gotten something odd with a beta version of some Linux flavor that requires recompiling the kernel before making phone calls. But here I am with my iPhone. The first thought that came into my lazy sysadmin mind is how can my iPhone make my life even easier than it already is. I mean, I have pretty much come across almost everything that the fourth industrial revolution had to offer.

Receiving on-the-go emails and text messages from various system monitoring applications is useful but hardly impressive these days. Besides, if you receive an email alert that some server you support is having a CPU bottleneck, you will need a quick and easy way of analyzing and fixing the problem. Below is a quick review of some of the system monitoring apps available for iPhone. There are many more such applications available for the iPhone (both factory-standard and jailbroken varieties)  but the following few are the crème de la crème in my opinion.

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Server Remote

The Server Remote is a basic but effective server-monitoring application for iPhone. It requires SSH access to the servers and does not use a server-side agent. The information Server Remote provides includes uptime, load averages, memory and swap utilization.

The Server Remote also allows you execute commands on the server. An example of a useful command you can run would be: top -b -n 2 You can also use the this functionality to kick-off system maintenance scripts. This is much easier than using a dedicated SSH client to connect to your server.

In a few rare cases Server Remote may run into an authentication issue with the server, even though the username and password you entered are correct. Hopefully, the developer is working on this, although in my experience this is a very rare problem and is likely caused by some very old versions of SSH running on some hosts.

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iStat

iStat provides you with detailed information for the iPhone itself as well as for Mac, Linux, and Solaris servers. The server information is collected via an agent application (free) that needs to be downloaded and installed on the server. The installation process for Linux and Solaris requires compiling some source code and has a couple of pre-requisites, but in my experience this process was quick and painless.

The agent runs as a daemon and can be automatically started with the system. You can create a separate startup script for /etc/init.d or you can add a couple of lines to an existing startup script (i.e. /etc/init.d/network or /etc/init.d/smb, for example). The information provided by the iStat agent includes: breakdown of CPU utilization, breakdown of memory and swap utilization, disk space information, network traffic summary (for one NIC), uptime and load information. Additionally, iStat can collect ping and traceroute stats.

When compiling iStatd agent, I suggest using the following options. This will install the agent in /opt/istat and create the default /etc/istatd.conf config file:

mkdir /opt/istat

./configure –prefix=/opt/istat –sysconfdir=/etc

make

make install

For startup, just the following lines to any of the existing startup scripts (like /etc/init.d/smb for example) to the “start” and “restart” sections:

kill -9 `ps -ef | grep [i]stat | awk ‘{print $2}’`

/opt/istat/bin/istatd&

I found no serious issues with iStat. One small problem was that the app seems to ignore custom disk labels specified in istatd.conf and instead uses physical drive names. It would also be nice if the app could provide CPU, RAM, and disk I/O information on per-process basis (similar to “top”). Adding support for multiple NICs is also a feature I would like to see in this great app.

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The five excellent apps below are by the same developer – Pavel Ahafonau. It is not often that you find a decent iPhone app worth the measly few bucks you spend on it. Finding five brilliant ones – all written by the same guy – is something truly remarkable in the iPhone world. Great job dude.

Net Status

Net Status allows you to monitor availability of remote network services. For example, you can keep an eye on your Web server to make sure http, https and mysql services are active. Net Status can monitor a great variety of network services and does not require any configuration (other than your server’s URL or IP). And it is much faster than any other similar iPhone app due to its multi-threaded network monitoring capability.

Here’s a practical situation when Net Status can come in handy: you support dozens of Web servers and a customer calls you saying that he can’t connect to MySQL database. You can quickly use Net Status to see if mysqld service is responding on the network.

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Nice Trace

Nice Trace is a traceroute application for iPhone and it is something quite remarkable. Sysadmins and network admins use traceroute command on the daily basis to analyze all kinds of network-related problems.

Nice Trace has many of the same options available with Linux traceroute. Unlike traceroute, however, Nice Trace displays the results in a much more pleasing manner. It also continuously updates network performance details for each hop, allowing to continuously monitor network conditions in real time.

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Scany

Scany is a network and Port scanner for iPhone. Another great application from the creator of Net Status and Nice Trace. Give this app an IP range (say, 192.168.122.1 – 192.168.123.254) and it will use its multi-threaded scanner to find all active IPs much faster than any other network scanner for iPhone that I have seen.

Optionally, you can use Scany to detect which network services are running on which IP. The resulting list can be exported directly to Net Status for future monitoring. A great application for sysadmins and network admins alike. Just the other day I used Scany to find out which users were running P2P servers on their laptops on our company’s new WiFi network. And then I had a little chat with them.

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Deep Whois

With Deep Whois you can look up information for any domain in just seconds. You will not have to jump from one registrar’s “whois” server to another in search of detailed information. Deep Whois works with standard, special and international domains.

Domain names can be saves and organized into groups. This way you can keep track of any changes in whois information. Additionally, the info you collect can be copied to clipboard or emailed.

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RBL Status

RBL stands for “Real-time Blackhole List”. And yet, RBL Status is not an astronomy application. According to Wikipedia, “in networking, black holes refer to places in the network where incoming traffic is silently discarded (or “dropped”), without informing the source that the data did not reach its intended recipient.” What this means is that an IP address present on many of these RBLs is probably responsible for sending out a lot of spam and so other networks will just quietly drop all traffic coming for this IP.

This is a bad thing if this is your IP. For example, if you have a user on your company network and this user has a virus on his laptop that is generating lots of spam, your company’s entire external IP may get blacklisted. This is definitely something worth monitoring. If you see your IP addresses starting to appear on a lot of these RBLs, then you need to find out why and quickly.

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