Tue, 14 Oct 2008
SSH and the Network Gear
How do you configure and manage your network gear? Am I the only person in the world who uses SSH (OpenSSH) to remote login to my switches, access points, master switches, etc.? Does everybody use "unified" tools (but for one vendor only) like HP ProCurve Manager?
I have recently discovered that I cannot login to one of my HP ProCurve switches - the switch just kept dropping the connection with the following message:
Received disconnect from 147.251.XX.YY: 2: protocol error: rcvd type 80
At first I suspected a SW or HW failure on the switch side (it could not possibly be a software problem as even HP uses OpenSSH in their firmware). But even after rebooting the switch I was not able to log in. I was in a hurry so I configured the switch over a serial console. But yesterday I have found that I have similar problems even when connecting to my APC 7920 master switches. That definitely looked as a problem on my side instead. So I tried to downgrade OpenSSH from 5.1p1 to 5.0p1, and the connections to my network gear are working again. Repored to Fedora as bug#466818.
But I still wonder why the bug was not discovered earlier, according to the install date of my openssh packages, they are at least a month old (build date is even older). And an incompatibility between OpenSSH and OpenSSH? WTF?