OpenSSH and GNUStep
One of the things that's been bothering me for a while is the inability for me to run scp and sftp to sparky from my iBook, sherman. I could ssh to sparky OK, but when I tried to get one of the others to work I had a lot of problems. Well... last night I decided to give it a real go and upgrade OpenSSH on sparky with the hopes that this would solve the problem. Of course, nothing's that easy.
Since sparky is a SPARC 20, I went to SunFreeware to get the latest packages for Solaris 7, SPARC edition. I really have to tip my hat to these guys... this is a lot of work to put these packages together for all the different combinations of Solaris and CPU, but they do a wonderful job of it.
Anyway, I get the latest packages for OpenSSH, and realize that I'm going to need to get the latest OpenSSL as well. No biggie, I get both and install them with pkgadd. Then I try to run it. Begin the detour to get it really working. You see, the latest OpenSSH/OpenSSL needs to have an entropy server running so after reading the OpenSSH install page on SunFreeware (which is, thankfully, exceptional) I get the three other packages I needed and installed them. Then it was a matter of about a dozen commands to get the entropy generator going and then OpenSSH ran. I was able to ssh into the box, but alas, still no scp or sftp.
So I go to Google and I get a few ideas - like making sure the path to scp is correctly set. It was, of course, but in doing that I noticed that something wasn't quite right. I was getting an environment variable error, so I went into my .login file and fixed that up. Still no luck, but closer, as ssh sparky 'which scp' worked as it should.
The final step came putting my girls to bed for the night: I've had GNUstep running on this box for a while as I've really liked the OPENSTEP object library, and in my .login the GNUstep app to 'make services' is run. This came to be because there was a process id showing up at each call to ssh, scp, and sftp. When I finally put it together it seemed obvious - GNUstep was sending something or blocking something that was OK for ssh but wasn't OK for scp or sftp.
When I commented out the call in my .login everything worked great! Now I can move files to sparky with scp which is not only faster but a lot more secure than ftp.