One of the most common topics in the jailbreak forums is always theme editing and customization. To really be able to truly customize a theme, you need to know how to SSH into your iPhone. Anyone who is already familiar with web development and using an FTP client should be right at home. For the most part, FTP clients are also capable of SSH. Using the Secure Shell (SSH) network protocol, you can exchange data between your iPhone and computer on the same network, while also having the ability to make changes to the hard drive on your iPhone. The Browser window is the main part of the application window in Cyberduck. The folders and files that you see in the Browser window can be thought of as a Finder (Mac) or Explorer (PC) window for your FTP server. Therefore, transferring files with Cyberduck simply involves dragging files from one window to another.

One of the most common topics that I see come up at iPhone forum sites over and over is problems with connecting to the iPhone via SSH. So I thought I ‘d do a quick post covering some good things to check when troubleshooting these issues.

Cyberduck Key

These suggestions may not fix every SSH connection problem, but they should help you resolve most, and will certainly mean you ‘ve covered the basics and most likely causes of a connection failure.

In this post I ‘m going to assume that you are already comfortable with the basics of using SSH to connect to your iPhone, and have already got SSH apps setup on both your iPhone and the PC you ‘re using to connect to it.

Cyberduck Sftp

If you ‘re not comfortable with the above, or need some help with your initial setup, please give my more general How-to post on this subject “ How To: Connect To Your iPhone Via SSH.

Ok, so let ‘s talk about what to do if you ‘ve got yourself all setup “ on the iPhone and PC “ with SSH apps and you still have problems connecting via SSH.

There are a variety of error messages you can get from SSH clients when connections fail. One of the most common is ‘Network error: Connection refused ‘. I ‘m not going to try to break this up into sections for every common error message “ for that, you might want to see this post that offers some advice along those lines for common WinSCP errors.

Cyberduck Scp

Instead, the suggestions below should be useful things to try for nearly all errors you ‘ll encounter. Many of them are quite obvious things “ but they are also things that most of us have had at least a few ‘DOH ‘ moments on, and these checks can bring a quick fix when we do.

Things To Try If You Cannot Connect To Your iPhone Via SSH:

• If you get a timeout error, try increasing the timeout setting
• Make sure SSH is turned on, on the iPhone – Generally the easiest way to do this is to use an app like SB Settings that gives you a GUI interface to toggle the service on and off with.
• Make sure WiFi is turned on, on the iPhone “ again, via SB Settings or the iPhone ‘s built-in Settings applet.
• Check that you are specifying the right port in your desktop SSH app (e.g. WinSCP on Windows or Cyberduck on Mac). The port needs to be 22.
• Make sure you are entering the correct “ and *current* “ IP address for the iPhone. If your iPhone gets a DHCP (dynamically configured) IP address from your router (as most do), then its address can and will change over time. So its IP address today may be different to the one it had last week when you last successfully connected. To check this go to Settings > WiFi “ and tap on the blue arrow next to your active WiFi connection “ the screen that takes you to will display the iPhone ‘s current IP address.
• Verify that the iPhone has a *valid* IP address. When you are checking the address per the above point, if you see an address that starts with 169.254.x then the iPhone is not getting a usable IP address “ and you need to troubleshoot that issue first.
• Remember that the iPhone and the PC you ‘re tying to connect from must be on the same WiFi network. One of the easiest ways to tell this is to see if their IP addresses look similar. For instance, many default home WiFi networks will have IP addresses that start with 192.168.x.
• Check that you do not have any antivirus, firewall, or security software on your PC that may be blocking your outbound SSH connection. One of the easiest ways to quickly rule this out (or pin the blame on it) is to shut down any and all of those services on your PC temporarily and try connecting. If it still fails, you know those services are not to blame.
• Password check “ you need to be using the correct username and password for connection to the iPhone. If you have never changed these (which the vast majority of iPhone users have not “ and you would know if you did) then the most likely defaults are username ‘root ‘ and password either ‘alpine ‘ or ‘dottie ‘. Please note “ you do not type the ‘ ‘ inverted commas around the username or password.
• The iPhone cannot be in ‘sleep mode ‘ when you are trying to connect. You may just want to change your Auto-Lock setting to ‘Never ‘ just for while you are connecting “ to avoid this issue.
• Make sure you are using the correct protocol setting in your desktop SSH app. This varies according to which client app you are using. WinSCP uses SCP, for example.

Again, checking and correcting these things may not resolve every connection issue you come across “ but they should help in the majority of cases. I hope some of you will find these helpful, and look forward to hearing any of your tips you ‘d like to share for these issues.

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