Have been a loyal Openssh customer since time starts but it falls behind in the mobile computing era. This finding is when I try to get a decent solution running SSHD on a smartphone.
Of course, I can set up a PC, run the beautiful Ubuntu with SSHD server, but in the end of year 2012, a mobile computing booming year, every applications on PC must also have a tag says "Smartphone Ready".
This comes to Dropbear, an implementation of SSHD server, particularly targets to small devices and embedded Linux systems, such as wireless routers, such as smartphones.
Power consumption which can be totally ignored and less carbon foot-print, just do one simple task at a time, and you can trust it run 24 hours a day without any fuss. Hmmm ..., sounds interesting. And its developer, Matt Johnson, an Aussie who maybe lives in a big Australian city like Melbourne, make Dropbear more trustworthy.
After start Dropbear service on a smartphone, and I could remotely log on the device the first time, and find out every directory, every file under the bonnet. Actually Android is just Linux insides the mascot, with same common styles and familiar command lines like bash, ps, vi ..., you can name it.
Another goodies you get from Dropbear is it does fully support SSHD standard, that means SSHD can become a socks proxy server.
This is especially useful when you are in a "doggy" internet cafe, trying to do especially more "doggy" thing, and you don't want to anyone find out what you are doing on internet. Or you are trying to access gentleman business confidential materials, for example a fiesty porno website, but content filtered and access denied by the Great Firewall setup by Australian Labour government's communication minister Stephen "you-damned-communist" Conroy ...
Anyway, give Dropbear a bear hug, on your smartphone especially. You won't be disappointed. I promise you.
I'm running SSHD on my old N900, and that's the primary tool I use to do more complex stuff (that would just be painful on a small keyboard) and rsync documents & files around.