May 22, 2012

Transmit SFTP Failure

I ran into a strange problem today where my attempts to SFTP to my server were failing but I could SSH in just fine. My login credentials were correct, and my server logs weren't indicating a failure. They seemed to indicate a problem with the client.

May 21 10:56:55 binibik systemd-logind[979]: New session 21304 of user wesley.
May 21 10:56:55 binibik sshd[7714]: subsystem request for sftp by user wesley
May 21 10:56:55 binibik sshd[7714]: Received disconnect from 69.53.237.65:11: disconnected by user
May 21 10:56:55 binibik systemd-logind[979]: Removed session 21304.

I am using the wonderful Transmit FTP client and version 3 of the client displayed an error dialog stating 'permission denied' while version 4 of the client displayed an error dialog stating the username or password was incorrect.

So both the server logs and client error message was incorrect and therefore misleading. I turned on Transmit verbose logging which showed authentication succeeded. I think the log messages might have indicated something was wrong but there wasn't a clear message indicating so.

Turns out the problem was my sshd_config configuration. The sftp subsystem configuration line was pointing at an old file location that no longer existed. I fixed that so it pointed at the correct location and everything works now.

Subsystem	sftp	/usr/lib/ssh/sftp-server

Posted by josuah at May 22, 2012 4:23 AM UTC+00:00