Hi all,

we are just confused about a strange problem on one server in production (XServer, running OSXS 10.5.6). It works normal for month. Since two day everthing seems to be fine also with one exception.

When we connect trough ssh we won't get a tty session. For testing purposes, we enabled telnet and try to connect from another server behind the firewall to the machine. But no "login" occured.

If you launch something like ssh user@machine "my command" you will get the output as normal.

We don't know the reason. Fact is, no system update oder software update was done since the last weeks and ssh worked properly till Saturday.

I think it's no problem of ssh. It's something behind ssh. But ssh -vvv won't give more information.

So our current workaround is ssh user@server "bash". But this is extremly uncomfortable without concrete ttys. Using this way and e.g. running vi will give the short information:

Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal
Vim: Warning: Input is not from a terminal

It's probably a pty you are missing. OpenSSH 4.3.2 (I think) had a bug creating pty sessions. In Linux the call is openpty(), in OSX - I do not know.

You may want to enable some more warnings in syslog.conf. The messages you need are probably not showing up.

See:
Mac OS X Manual Page For syslog.conf(5)

ssh -t