Being on call can sometimes suck. been there, never again!

Have  you considered one of the new small laptops with 3G etc. Perhaps the forthcoming HTC Shift or something similar. Your employer should be happy to pay for it if its for on-call duties...
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it's political correctness gone mad!!!

There's always something like this. You can even apparently install a real OS on it.
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_{ウセーバラケダ}

have had decent success with the sidekick and ssh

iPhone would work, but what a pain to use the multitouch keyboard for things like "ps -aux | grep foo"

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I just ate about 7 pounds of meat
-theantix

I wouldn't suggest the iPhone unless you're going to use a lot of short commands, as typing, while acceptable, isn't so acceptable to me at the shell level. Then again, maybe all you'll end up typing are aliased commands and script kickoffs.

However, the reason I say you're going to hate life is that, at first, it may seem like a nifty, convenient idea to be SSHing in to fix stuff, or just check general health, but eventually it is a net loss to your life. The digital leash becomes that much tighter, and it becomes just a tad bit harder to breathe. If you can possibly engineer a way to get out of doing it, and just consistently telling anyone who calls you with a problem outside of office hours that you'll get to it when you get back home (even if you're home; they don't know that shit) where you have network access. If they press you to do it, make up some bullshit about how you're concerned with the security model of doing that, since, even if shit is encrypted, a motherfucker can still pull the old "GIVE ME THAT PHONE, BITCH, OR I'LL CUT YOU UP THE MIDDLE" hack, and you just got robbed of all sorts of logs, hostnames, and whatnot. Appeal to the nerd tendancy to automatically believe that everyone except them is technically incompetent, and if necessary, play the Security Idiocy One-Upsmanship Game to the hilt. Take no prisoners, and aim for the chest, using 3 round bursts, slightly to right of the target's center of mass. Just, whatever you do, don't go down the "I'll just SSH in to work real quick on my phone, It'll be fine" path. It won't be fine.

It really, really won't.

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You can build the most elegant fountain in the world, but eventually a winged rat will be using it as a drinking bowl.

As per iphone, for shell an onscreen keyboard is this close to too frustrating (for quick restarts or fixed/scripted commands ok). And while there's a good possibility that you'd find the n800 really nice (taking away somewhat from the "another device!?" valid q) when you add a bt keyboard it's two devices to carry around and because they're not physically held together it's not really "on the go" typing, you really must be sitting down, at which point... meh. I do not carry the kb (stowaway) with me much, although the n800 goes everywhere with me. Plus side, I just picked up an HSDPA phone so I've got deliciously fast internet everywhere on a tasty screen everywhere. EDGE is rough (iphone dig).

Everyone else I know with such a need is using a Treo or blackberry, but they're nerds.

If this thing ever gets released, buy it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC

Or I suppose you could go for an OLPC and strip out all the kid software. But really if you want a keyboard that doesn't suck you're gonna have to go with some kind of laptop. Blackberries will wear your thumbs out.

Like mns said (before he started rambling about weapons) most of all avoid having to log into the server at 3 AM while drunk (it will happen). Trust me man: actively replicated backup server cluster with automatic switch-over. If you're doing it with Linux I can give you some tips. PM me.

True story: the first time I met Theo de Raadt he showed me how he could get ssh on his Blackberry. But I was too drunk to understand it, really.

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imagine dancing banana here

You definitely want a keyboard, so the Nokia E61 would be your absolute miniumum if you want all in one. However, the screen res is entertainingly better on the smaller E60 (which I have but use a fraction of the features of). If you could find the holy grail of a small bluetooth keyboard, pretty much any smartphone will do.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

"Stabbing someone in the head with a pitchfork is rarely beneficial to the relationship." - MereKat

Of course, my main purpose in having a Windows Mobile based PDA was so I could use Emulators to play NES and SNES games.  There's also FTP, Instant Messenger, Email, etc. applications.  Other than high resource using apps, you can find pretty much anything that Windows has built for Windows Mobile too.
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That's what I always say about you, boz, you have a good memory for random facts about pussy. -- joh3n

I'd go with the laptop / notebook. You can get plenty of decent ones for dirt cheap brand new, and you can get pretty awesome ones (Thinkpads etc.) second-hand for a pretty miniscule amount. You might even be able to bill your employer for the cost.

I got a second-hand T42 that I use for exactly this purpose which, while hardly "small", is still smaller than the ones all my friends own and light enough for my needs. If you were concerned about weight, you could get one of the lighter ones (X series etc.). Yes; it's something extra to lug around, but it has its upsides. For one: It means you can have a lightweight phone, as you've outsourced all the heavier-duty crap to the computer. For two: You don't need to carry it everywhere. Mine spends most of its life in a rucksack or in the car (i.e. you don't have to physically carry it that often). For three: If you get stuck anywhere (hotel room, train, meeting delayed etc.), you can surf the web, do some developing, watch fillums, play ReVolt etc. almost as well as on a workstation.

Those 'little' devices can be a lot more cumbersome and bulky to live with than they initially seem, and it some ways are actually easier to lose / get stolen than a notebook.

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Done.

I've been using a palm based treo for over 3 years now. I've also been using it to do exactly what you want.

It's not the easiest to use, but it's the most usable mobile device I've found. I use pssh, which gives me access to all the keys I've ever needed without opening up the menu, between the keyboard and the onscreen keys.

It probably helps that I use it every day to ssh to my shell and reattach my irc session. Doing this means that I got practice so when I had to use it for real work I wasn't spending a bunch of time trying to figure out where certain characters were.

Now I just have EVDO in my laptop, so I pull it out instead of the phone. Still, the phone has saved me a time or two, especially when I didn't drive so my laptop was not in the trunk.

As a smartphone the treo falls flat in a lot of area (no multitasking, shitty web browser) but it's easily the best device for quick fixes in the field via ssh.

since I fiddled around with anything of the sort, but one caveat based on my couple-years-old experience:

Find your application(s) before you purchase a device, and make sure that your definitions of SSH match - I found a lot of SSH1, but much less SSH2.

on officially getting the DBA position!

See you in ... uh, probably today (or tomorrow)!

The Blackberry has a serviceable ssh app (MIDPssh) which isn't too terrible if you have a full-QWERTY Blackberry.  But the rest of the Blackberry sucks.

The Sidekick has a pretty good ssh app (Terminal) which is pretty good, but the rest of the Sidekick fucking sucks.

The Treo has an ssh app which is okay until you try to press a key that's not directly on the keypad, which is apparently just plain Not Possible since the extended-key modifier just gets sent directly as something goofy.

The various Windows Mobile or Symbian devices are probably good, though if you're on T-Mobile it'll be difficult to get a compatible data plan (the $6/mo plan only lets you do web and email, no ssh, although the $30/mo plan lets you do everything else too, and if you pester a CSR enough they might let you get the old $20/mo plan which is the same as the $30/mo plan except without the useless hotspot access).
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i like plaid