Essential Android Tools

I've been slowly migrating off of doing remote administration from a laptop, and moving almost exclusively to my Android device. I've got a screen in Launcher Pro set up exclusively for system administration related items.

This is what's on there:

• Adao File Manager: Keep PDFs of documentation in a folder right on your system administration screen
  
• Barcode Scanner: Use it to read those service tags
  
• Bubble Level
  
• Calculator
  
• Calendar: You do keep a calendar, right?
  
• Camera: Take snaps of screens with error messages on them, use it to note where things are plugged in before you take them apart.
  
• CamScanner: Uses the camera as a scanner to create PDFs
  
• Color Flashlight: Either use it to illuminate that hard to see part of that rack in that poorly lit closet, or turn it into a rave.
  
• ConnectBot: Great little SSH Client, also lets you access the console on your phone
  
• DNS Lookup
  
• Evernote: Keeps any random notes on both your phone and the web
  
• K-9 Mail: Best email client out there for IMAP on Android
  
• LED Light: Turns on the LED flash on your camera. Great for nice bright light when you need it.
  
• Maps
  
• Messaging: Nagios notifications
  
• Miren Browser: Best browser currently available for Android
  
• Overlook Fing: Network scanner and port scanner
  
• Ping
  
• PocketCloud: Wyse is apparently still around. Free version allows you to connect to one host (either RDP or VNC!) and the Pro version allows multiple hosts.
  
• Remember The Milk: Task list on both your phone and the web. You'll need to subscribe to get the Android client, but it is so worth it
  
• Trillian: Multi IM Client. Most stable I've tried so far.
  
• VPN Show: Just puts a shortcut to your VPN connection on the screen, so you don't have to go digging through the menu
  
• Wifi Analyzer: Shows pretty graphs of signal strength. Useful for both analysis and explaining to users why they can't connect to the wifi from the Faraday cage that is their tiny office.
  
• WoL Wake On Lan Wan: Send magic packets to turn on your (appropriately configured) computer
  

Automated reboot of Netgear FVG318

I'm having trouble with some Netgear FVG318 wireless VPN routers. They can't seem to release their DHCP leases without a reboot, and there's no way to schedule a reboot on them.

Other than that, these are really great, reasonably priced little devices.

Hopefully my contacts with Netgear Support will yield a fix so that they don't run out of DHCP leases *for no reason*, but until then I need a workaround.

So, I used some wget magic to script logging in, saving the necessary cookies, and executing the reboot function.

Just replace your.fvg318.ip with your FVG318's IP, replace youradminpassword with your admin password. I doubt the line breaks will come out proper in blogspot, so I'll tell you that there is only one line of command between each comment line -- if it line wraps on here, you will need to make sure your copy that you run does not wrap those lines.

Then just set this up in a cron job to run every night at midnight and voila! No more unhappy uesrs, no more manual reboots.

#!/bin/sh

# Load login page
/usr/bin/wget --no-check-certificate -q -O - --save-cookies /tmp/netgear-cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies 'https://your.fvg318.ip/' > /dev/null

# Log in
/usr/bin/wget --no-check-certificate -q -O - --save-cookies /tmp/netgear-cookies.txt --load-cookies /tmp/netgear-cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies --referer='https://your.fvg318.ip/platform.cgi' --post-data='web0x120010=admin&web0x120011=youradminpassword&umi.loginAuth=Login' 'https://your.fvg318.ip/platform.cgi' > /dev/null

# Reboot
/usr/bin/wget --no-check-certificate -q -O - --save-cookies /tmp/netgear-cookies.txt --load-cookies /tmp/netgear-cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies --referer='https://your.fvg318.ip/diagnostics.htm' --post-data='umi.restartWrap.x=69&umi.restartWrap.y=14' 'https://your.fvg318.ip/platform.cgi' > /dev/null