Android has it’s ADB and it’s great. But for me, it’s not always enough, especially since it has no way to authenticate the user and there is no encryption. That’s why I need SSH too. OpenSSH is to big for embedded systems so I’m using dropbear.

Dropbear is already inside of Android tree, in external/dropbear directory. Problem is, Android.mk is configured to only compile SSH client while I need a server. So there are two solutions - changing Android.mk to also compile server or build it externally. In this article I will show the later approach. more ...

Android has its own init system with a special init.rc configuration file. This file uses its own syntax which, unlike shell scripts used in classical sysvinit, does not allow you to do everything you might need. Instead, it has its own (rather limited) set of actions that it can do (like mkdir, chmod, chown, etc). There is, however, exec keyword defined that should execute specified command (could be a shell script) but unfortunately, it is not implemented (I mean, the keyword is recognized by it does nothing). more ...