Last month WebShell announced their SSH client for the iPhone, intended to make connecting via a secure channel to your iPhone straightforward.  If you're willing to indulge in a little hackery, though, then you needn't invest in software; the clever sods on the #iphone IRC channel have put together instructions for how to set it up yourself.

It's a technique that doesn't require resetting the iPhone, instead overwriting an existing binary and plist which causes the handset to call chmod on the Dropbear ssh server and allow it to be executed.  It'll allow you to access your iPhone from your Mac via a shell, send and retrieve files using scp or sftp and use the compilation toolchain to build other Unix utilities.

Happily the process will work on both Macs and PCs.

[via TUAW]