SSH for noobs on Debian

[KuJoe]

Is SSH enabled by default? Is iptables blocking external connections for port 22 by default? I'm not able to get any display on my HDMI but I can get the device to pull a DHCP IP address but attempts to connect to port 22 are being refused (not timing out). I don't care about video right now, command line is really all I need to do my testing but if I need to get my display working in order to SSH into the device then that's going to be a problem for a lot of users.

Can somebody verify if any Linux distro has SSH working out of the box? Also can somebody check why SSH is not working for Debian on a fresh install?

Thanks.