Many of us have installed Boxee on our Apple TVs and in the process we’ve installed other utilities such as Secure SHell (SSH). Why care? Well it opens up a lot of possibilities for you to access your Apple TV. If you are comfortable with the Terminal on Mac OS X (or command line in Linux) then you likely know about SSH and have already logged into your Apple TV, if not, this might seem like UNIX gobbledygook. Not to worry, there things you can do with SSH that don’t require terminal commands at all.
The Apple TV runs Mac OS X 10.4.8 (not sure about .8 or .7, Darwin version is 8.8.2) which means when you log in you have most of the same terminal capabilities you have on a Mac. If logging in from a Mac your Apple TV will likely have a Bonjour address already – AppleTV.local (possibly AppleTV-2.local). If using Windows or Linux you will need to figure the IP address of your AppleTV. This can be done through a network address scanner or directly from your router.
Apple TV’s default username and password are frontrow and frontrow. You may wish to change this since SSH is now enabled on your Apple TV to make it more secure. To login to your Apple TV use the following commands from the Terminal:
Mac:
ssh frontrow@AppleTV.local
Welcome to the AppleTV (via atv-usbcreator)
frontrow@appletv.local's password:
frontrow
Linux:
ssh frontrow@IP address of Apple TV
Welcome to the AppleTV (via atv-usbcreator)
frontrow@appletv.local's password:
frontrow
Once you are logged in you should see:
-bash-2.05b$
Try a simple command to list the files:
ls
You should see:
Documents Downloads Library Movies Music
-bash-2.05b$
For those Windows users out there I recommend Putty which has a visual interface for logging into remote hosts. Select the SSH protocol, port 22, user “frontrow” and password “frontrow”. That should log you in – be sure to save this profile for next time.
That’s a start. I’ll follow up with using SSH to transfers files and to perform some tweaking to enable external USB drives and Apple Filing Protocol (AFP).
