I recently heard the term “multipad lifestyle” on Accidental Tech in relation to CGPGrey and the holy-grail of what Apple will do with window-mangement on the iPad. It seems to be a good term describing my use-case with my iPad Pro lately.
If it can be said that early PCs adopted the typewriter analog early on, it can be said iPad Pro is more akin to a notebook or clipboard. Both productive tools, but up until recently I have only seen my iPad Pro as a pricey tool for taking notes or drawing with Pencil (a fantastic writing experience, I might add). I liked my Surface Pro 3 for the same use-case, but iPad Pro’s smoother stylus won out and now I have begun to press further into what is possible on the device. One possibility that emerged is using iPad Pro as another studying location for CCIE labbing. It turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.
There are increasingly a lot of apps designed for primary-use on either Mac or iPad. These apps employ using sync to glue it all together, and in best-case scenarios you are able to move smoothly between devices. It takes a little workflow-adaptation, but the result is you can take a tiny light device on a weekend trip and still get some studying or other work done. I think that’s what this multipad lifestyle is all about.
There are 3 SSH apps I use religiously to manage routers and switches at work and for study. At the office I mostly use VanDyke’s SecureCRT. Their iPad port of SecureCRT is great, but still relies on iTunes-sync to get sessions from the PC/Mac SecureCRT app over to the iPad version.
Then there is Prompt 2 which has a great UI and syncs sessions/keys across devices, but there is no Mac-equivalent. No place to enter/manage sessions from your main workstation.
This is where vSSH for iPad comes into play — a basic SSH solution offering full sync of sessions between their Mac and iPad/iPhone apps, which makes quickly moving between devices much easier. I can be in the middle of a lab and go right from my MacBook or iMac over to my iPad Pro, and not miss a beat.
vSSH is a little more stripped-down than SecureCRT or Prompt 2, but extremely maleable to my labbing needs. I like to think of it as “Putty for iOS”.
Using an app like vSSH to start up my labbing I find that new study workflows can happen where I can just turn off Notifications and focus. With iPad Pro and split-screen multi-tasking, you can open study PDFs or eBooks alongside vSSH and get-going on most any lab topology. I have a million Cisco IOS snippets rolling around on my Mac in Dash or Evernote, which are sometimes tempting to consult when doing configuration tasks. To be working on building speed and muscle-memory in lab-building, having only one or two apps in my face helps. With labbing on an iPad, it’s just me and the gear and no other pop-ups or content to distract me.
I typically lab in my home office standing desk with a 5K iMac and 4K companion screen — but more often I am either working on my MBP or (if traveling) lugging my iPad Pro around meetings or for other quick-trip tasks. With my iPad Pro I can kick-start a lab on a moment’s notice during those down times, and the more speed and proficiency I gain with various configuration tasks IOS, the easier CCIE study gets for me on this platform.
