I have seen some scattered reports of problems connecting to other systems using 10.0.4 (which includes OpenSSH 2.9p1, according to Apple's documentation). The connection begins, but then terminates with the message "Disconnecting: Bad packet length -898731090", or just fails to connect. To help debug the problem, you can try using SSH with a
-v option, which is verbose mode and will show you the details of the connection attempt.
The
X4U mailing lists have had some discussion on this topic, and have come up with three possible solutions:
- Try connecting with the 'blowfish' encryption scheme (ssh -c blowfish xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)
- Compile and install OpenSSH 2.9p2 on your OS X box (there are instructions on StepWise)
- Upgrade the other machine (if you can) to OpenSSH 2.9p1 or later
- Try forcing SSH to use SSH1 instead of SSH2 (ssh -1 machine.domain.com) [noticed on MacFixit this morning]
- Regenerate your SSH keys (use ssh-keygen at the command line) [from the comments below]
Each of the above methods has worked for at least one user. Personally, SSH is working for me just as it did before the upgrade, but if you're having troubles, try one of the above solutions.