SSH / SCP problems between Solaris and OS X

[chicken]

Ever since our Solaris sysadmins started using a commercial version of SSH, we have been unable to SCP files from our OS X (Panther) machines to the Solaris machine, and have had to go the other direction:

solaris machine > scp me@osx.machine.edu:Desktop/foo .

This is fine, I can live with it. People say there's no way around this annoying difference between commercial and open source SSH.

The problem is that today, even going in that direction stopped working. (It has worked for months, years even).

Now I get this error (when executing the command shown above) --

warning: Connecting to osx.machine.edu failed: Connection Refused
scp: warning: child process (/opt/local/bin/ssh2) exited with code 2.

Does anyone know why this is suddenly happening? Our Solaris sysadmins have not announced any sudden Solaris updates, and there hasn't been an OS X Panther update in a while either. (Of course, sometimes they do forget to tell us things.)

Comments

[rms2.livejournal.com]

Is it possible that ssh on the Solaris machine is simply not listening on port 22? If your admins were dumb enough to switch away from OpenSSH, they might have lso goofed the configuration...

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Nope -- I found out that my OS X machine is somehow at fault. I tried scp-ing to a different office Mac than my own, and it worked fine.

So what the bleedin' F happened to my own Mac? If you have any notions, do share!

[rms2.livejournal.com]

Were you ever able to nail this down? If so, what was the solution?

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Still not -- haven't had time -- easy enough to get around the problem by SCPing a file to the Macserver first, and then from there to the Unix machines (which one has to do when off-campus regardless, due to which machines are open to the outside world and which aren't). ARGH.