A Samsung Galaxy S4 war story...

[rustybutt]

I work professionally as a Linux Systems Administrator and have been

known to spend some time working in data centers.  One day in 2013, I

was working in our Oakland data center.  It was one of those days when

the hardware just wasn't working right.  DVD drives were failing, disk

drives were dying...  Just a lame day.

I had a Linux laptop in the data center to do e-mail with and generally

access the internal network.  As I was working on it, I noticed that some

things were responding slowly or not at all.  "Uh-oh..."  I thought.  I

did some quick checking and our primary network router had gone down.

The company was a startup and everything was done on a tight budget, so

there were many single-points-of-failure and our router was one of them.

When that one piece of gear went down, the whole company and it's on-line

business was down.  With on-line companies, time is money, so this was

a business critical issue.

I hooked up my bluetooth headset and called my manager in San Francisco.

She gave me the phone number for router tech support.  I got their call

center in the Phillipines and they passed me onto a support engineer in

Bangalore, India.

Once we got console on the router and rebooted it, we realized that it's

configuration was lost and had not been saved off.  We got my manager

on the line in a 3-way conversation between Oakland, San Francisco and

Bangalore.  My manager had a copy of the configuration file and was going

to e-mail it to me, but how could I get it in e-mail if the router was down?!

I then configured my cell phone to act as a wireless access point to provide

Internet access for my Linux laptop.  I was able to get the configuration

file.  It was 1000 lines of text and I did a cut 'n paste into the serial

terminal window on my laptop, thus restoring the router to operation and

getting the company back on-line.

Now think about this for a moment.  All computers give off RFI (Radio

Frequency Interference).  Major data centers like I was working in are

an RFI soup.  So here I am wirelessly connected over Bluetooth from

my headset to the cell phone.  The cell phone is a radio, right?  It's

wireless connected to Verizon and I'm on a 3-way conversation between

Oakland, San Francisco and Bangalore, India.  And then we've got it

working as wireless access point for the Linux laptop.  All at once...

My Samsung Galaxy S4 isn't just a smart phone. It's a major piece of

computing and networking hardware.  Pretty cool.

[Snn5]

Great story.  I have used my phones is some unorthodox, or at least, usual and rarely used situations to get out of time-binds before.