SSH on BlackBerry

SSH (Secure Shell) is a remote adminstration utility typically for UNIX systens that provides secure access to the command line.

The service is provided by the UNIX deamon SSHD which listens on TCP/IP port 22.

A popular utility for providing SSH on BlackBerry is midpssh ( http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/ ) which is now maintained at http://ota.deltatech.com.mx/ and most importantly now digitally signed to allow low level features.

Recently midpssh this has stoppped working due to RIM BlackBerry Internet Service only allowing HTTP and HTTPS traffic through their proxies.

The solution is to change the SSH listener port on the SSH server to listen to Port 443 (HTTPS) instead of Port 22.

This can be done by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_conf and changing the line

Listen 22

to

Listen 443

Then restarting the SSHD service.

service sshd restart

To check to see if the sshd deamon is now listening on port 443 run the following command:

netstat -anp | grep ssh

If the sshd deamon is not listening on port 443 then it could be that the Apache web web server also running with that listener socket for HTTPS. To resolve this change the file /etc/httpd/httpd.conf/ssl.conf will have to be modified to change the listener port from 443 to something else such as 444.

Listen 444

To access secure services on the web server after this change requires the URL to be:

https://domain:444

The restart Apache and SSHD


service Apache restart
service sshd restart


Now you should be able to use midpssh to login from your BlackBerry to your SSH server using port 443 instead of 22 by using

domainname:443

If you need to access another server than only works on port 22 then login into your server then ssh from your server to the target server.

Tags: BlackBerry, Linux, Security