Some services offer free SSH accounts, to edit and access files anywhere, host websites, use them as proxies (or IPv6 gateways) and some even let you run processes like IRC bots and compilers.

Generally, such free Shell accounts impose a monthly bandwidth quota of a few megabytes, so you don’t use too much of their resources. Some providers are more generous than others, though, and some charge for additional space and bandwidth.

Most SSH providers offer Unix-based hosting. Mitja Sladovic offers a very large list of such free providers.

The most popular service is the SDF Public Access UNIX System, established in 1987. Free users are offered email hosting (POP or IMAP), games, access to the text-based ‘Lynx’ web browser, web hosting, various network utilities and 80MB space. For access to gcc, php etc., one must pay a one-off fee of $36. In order to validate your account, and receive access to network utilities, one must send them $1 or €5 (in order to deter spammers).

Blinkenshell is another interesting option. Free accounts get 50MiB of space, access to several compilers, an IPv6 tunnel, hosting, email, IRC access and even the ability to have MySQL databases. One can’t use Blinkenshell for IRC bots, though. A few services do provide access to eggdrop, a popular IRC bot, such as Polarhome and aeshells.

Naturally, novices may struggle with such services as no graphical interface is provided. These services do, however, provide a rapid way to compile applications on different platforms (like Linux and BSD) and allow boring processes, like IRC bots, to run for you.

Update: Freeshell is still the number one destination for free remote SSH accounts.

This helps if I’m near a PC but not if I’m playing with my five year old nephew at the North Sea. One of my backup plans included the installation of a Symbian version of Putty on my Nokie N73 mobile phone. Putty is a Telnet and SSH client that can be used to quickly connect to servers and start commands and scripts there. It would take only a minute or so to connect to the server and restart a module, like ftp, MySQL or Apache, if one of them crashes.

It can also be used to analyze what went wrong providing the server did not crash completely and does not restart. All that is needed is the free software PuTTY for Symbian OS which can be installed on a Symbian OS compatible mobile phones also known as S60 third edition smartphones.

Ports for UIQ 1, UIQ 2 and UIQ 3 are available as well. It’s actually pretty cumbersome to work with Putty on a mobile phone that does not have a full QWERTY keyboard with additional keys like ESC which is why the mobile version of Putty offers a special send menu that provides access to those special characters.

Here is a short list of all the other tools mentioned: Nmap, Nessus Remote Security Scanner, John the Ripper, Nikto, Superscan, pof, Ethereal, Yersinia, LCP, Cain and Abel, Kismet, Netstumbler and hping. Make sure you check the tools that you do not know about yet, it might be worth it.