You do have a pipe - press the upward 45 degree blue arrow followed by the sym key, it'll pop up an on screen keyboard with a bunch more symbols.

Open up an x-term and run: (I assume root for this kind of stuff)
netstat -a | awk /ssh/

You should see a result, if not something is borked up and we could figure out that problem later. If you do see a result then enter ifconfig and double check your IP address - make sure you're SSH'ing to the N900.

Nitdroid will not mess with ssh at all.

Also it's /etc/init.d/ssh (not sshd)