R-U-ON http://www.r-u-on.com/ is a great service, which has a free level and a paid.  Personally I used the free service for several years, now I use the paid service.

The Iphone app works with both absolutely fine.  Basically you create an account and then download a small program called an “agent”, this is set running or installed on your computer or server – these agents then connect to the r-u-on servers and send information.

You can get information about several things, most useful to myself is disk space, virtual memory usage, ram usage, cpu and load stats.  If any of these exceed limits set (you can customise them).  Critical failures can be notified by text message (theres a fee involved for this) which is absolutely essential.

The IPhone app simply connects to the r-u-on account and shows a summary, of your alarms (server’s which have exceeded a notification threshold – see the graphic below for this), or general server status – which hopefully is all green and show’s that all your servers are running well.  You can also view your trouble tickets, personally I’ve never done this and have no real idea what it is.

Screenshot of the alarm screen.

The only thing missing from the app is the ability for it to run in the background, though of course the Apple SDK does forbid this – bah! however it would be great if it could or some kind of background notification system used (which I believe may be available in OS 3.0 but not 100% sure).

Once downloaded the update I had to wait for it to transfer the files – then it rebooted – great stuff… until the emergency call slider appeared – hmm – nothing happened – left for 20 mins – nothing happened.  Odd..

Undock, redock – restart – still the same how odd. Time for the old fav – Turn off….. wait 5 mins….and turn on… and hey presto it worked.. So not the most smooth of updates – but nothing I am not used to.

Right first impressions.

It’s fast… Wayyyy fast, my Iphone is overloaded with apps – I mean really overloaded – we are talking 9 pages or so full of apps… and now it’s fast.

Switching between native things such as SMS , phone and dock is great – the hidden page to the left (spotlight) for searching is great… though maybe not too useful for me – I don’t store documents on the phone afterall.

MMS works with O2 and is brill about time – not got anyone to send me one yet – but me sending works – so that’s a big plus – suspect it costs me though, need to find out from O2.

Audio recording – brilliant, had an app to do it before – but this actually is higher quality – and the app tended to get confused if interrupted – this works in the background! so you can do things and it’s still recording – excellent!

Bluetooth pairing with headset – AT LAST – my old old phone could do this – and now my iphone can too – no more cables to listen to things I can wear my nice headphones and get the sound – the quality is good too – better than most pairings!

All in all brilliant – now all I need is the new apps (tom tom??) and video recording – which we know the phone can do if jailbroken – so come on – I don’t need high quality – I just need to be able to record my daughter playing sometimes!!

Oh and on itunes it looks like I can buy movies an series.. seems pretty good, what if my space is limited and the download time seems a bit excessive.. we will see.