Mailing List Archive

ssh frozen display - maybe missing responses
Hi,

I'm having a problem with connecting over ssh to a server (wrdsvr)
that has me perplexed. I'm wondering if any of you have come across
this before or have any ideas. I'm using putty to connect from my
WIndows VM desktop to a SLES 9 server running the package installed
OpenSSH_4.1p1, OpenSSL 0.9.7d 17 Mar 2004. It is up to date with the
latest patch for SLES 9.

If I connect to wrdsvr from my desktop over ssh and run certain
commands with multi-line output, the display freezes after the first
line. If I connect from my desktop to a different server (oksvr), and
then from oksvr I connect to wrdsvr, then there is no problem. In
fact, by running 'w' after connecting in that roundabout way I can see
that subsequent commands I type into the frozen window still run - I
just can't see anything in the window itself as the display is frozen.
I have sshd logging running in debug mode on wrdsvr and there is
nothing produced during this. There is also nothing in the putty event
log. If I type 'exit' in the frozen window, the server sees the
connection as closing normally and then gone. Usually my putty window
would then close automatically, but in this frozen case it doesn't. So
although it is sending characters I type in, it doesn't seem to be
receiving the output in return.

commands that run successfully are:
w
ls
man
less

commands that cause the display to freeze are:
ps ax
ls -l
top (for this one I don't even get the first line of output, it
freezes immediately)

The machine I'm connecting from is a VMFusion guest running Windows
XP. I get this behavior connecting using putty, but I also installed a
demo version of securecrt (when this issue occurred previously) which
saw the same problem, but I can't repeat it as my license expired.
(Last time the issue went away while I was troubleshooting an
immediate service-affecting problem on that and a number of other
servers and I don't know what fixed it!) I exported the putty registry
keys and the profiles for the two servers are identical. I tried
loading the profile for oksvr and temporarily changing the hostname to
wrdsvr, but saw the same issue. I am connecting over a Cisco VPN. My
colleague is on the local network and does not see this issue when he
connects to wrdsvr using putty. We are both using the same version of
putty 0.60.

Here is the background on the servers. Both wrdsvr and oksvr are
running SLES 9. My actions just before I noticed these issues were the
following. I updated them using you (yast online update) to the latest
patch versions. Using the rpms from Novell, I installed binutils,
make, gcc, and glibc-devel and finally VMware tools on both. I then
rebooted. Since then I've run you again but that hasn't changed
anything. I've compare the installed patches using diff and they are
the same. Now I'm working my way through the output of rpm -qVa on
each one, but nothing so far.

Thanks for your time,
Maria