Hi Brian,

I recently set up to run x windows over absolute telnet and have some
issues. I used to do this a lot on an older version of absolute telnet
without problems but the new features of absolute telnet may not be
playing well with them. I'm still on 6.28 - I didn't know that 7 has been
released.

I use the tabbed interface, and have the "Display remote X applications
on local X server" box checked on the SSH2 properties forwarding button.
However, only the last-opened tab session in a window can run the
X app, the other tabs get errors. On those rightmore tabs, I also get
errors when I run vi or vim "incorrect authentication" popup errors. Is
that just a feature of the tabbed interface?

Also, after making these changes, when I try to run SFTP, the
file transfer window opens then closes immediately. It seems specific
to the host it's connected to, not the window or tab. Weird.

thanks as always for a great product,
Lisa

Lisa,

Sorry it took me a while to get to this. I began diagnosing the X problem you described and realized pretty quickly that there indeed was a problem. It's pretty much just as you said. Each new window was stomping on the X11 authentication data for existing sessions. The result was that only the last window opened could use X windows. I've got an update that takes care of that. You can grab it here:

http://www.celestialsoftware.net/telnet/AbsoluteTelnet7.21.exe

As for the SFTP problem, it may be that the server in question does *not* have sftp installed or enabled. Normally, though, you would get a message stating that SFTP could not be established, then a graceful exit. Send me the contents of the sshd_config file and a snapshot of your Options->SSHInfo screen so I can debug this further.

Brian

Hold off on thinking about the SFTP problem - I've found that WinSCP also fails for one userid and works for the other, so I can get our IS to figure out the problem. I'm sure it's the same root cause. Thanks, Lisa

Thanks Lisa.

If you find out what the problem is, please let me know so I can reproduce here. Absolute should at least give a more verbose error message about what is wrong if it can. This may aid in a speedier problem resolution by an end user who has no idea where to begin.

Does WinSCP provide an error message?

WinSCP reports something like:

----
Connection has been unexpected closed. Server sent command exit status 128
Can't initialize SFTP protocol. Is the host running an SFTP server?
----

IS tracked it down to some weirdness in my .cshrc, but they didn't figure out how to fix it, it was somehow related to the existance of the .cshrc,
so maybe a shell issue. Everyone else has moved on to bash, I'm a bit old fashioned.

Meanwhile my WinSCP is now set up to use scp instead of sftp, and I
don't think Absolute Telnet supports that?

I really appreciate how responsive you are to issues!
Lisa

If you don't mind, can I ask what's in your .cshrc file? As long as it's not private.

Section 2.9 of the OpenSSH FAQ may help:

2.9 - sftp/scp fails at connection, but ssh is OK.
sftp and/or scp may fail at connection time if you have shell initialization (.profile, .bashrc, .cshrc, etc) which produces output for non-interactive sessions. This output confuses the sftp/scp client. You can verify if your shell is doing this by executing:

ssh yourhost /usr/bin/true

If the above command produces any output, then you need to modify your shell initialization.

In my environment, output from .cshrc does not cause it to fail, but it does cause it to just hang around doing nothing. In my environment, I used 'ssh localhost /bin/true' rather than the above. YMMV.

Ha-ha, that looks like it! I got an undefined variable error running that code as myself, but nothing was reported as the other user. I commented out those lines in my .cshrc and now the SFTP window stays open! Boy, that is an obscure connection from the problem to the symptom.

Very gratefully,
Lisa