The One and the Many

ssh works but scp hangs, sometimes

For a while now I've not been able to scp to one of my Raspberry Pi's from my desktop. scp would appear to connect and then hang. I looked into it initially but gave up. I've been working around it by scp'ing to a third host when I want to copy files to the Pi.

Today I decided to get to the bottom of it.

I discovered that ssh host w (replace w with any command) showed the same problem. Interestingly I discovered if I passed -t to ssh the command would succeed.

Googling for similar issues generally suggested the issue could be caused by MTU settings or strange things in ~/.bashrc/~/.profile. Neither of these were what was going on in my case.

My friend Robert Bisewski found the solution. He found this issue that sounded similar to the behaviour I was seeing. Amazingly the idea in the issue solved the problem! Adding IPQoS 0x00 to /etc/ssh/sshd_config was all it took. Contrary to what the Debian wiki says, putting the option in the client side config didn't help.

Why does this fix it? One thing we found was that there's no problem if I connect using my 2.4 GHz wireless network. It only happens when I'm on my 5 GHz network. I confirmed this by trying to connect from a second machine. Indeed the host I had been using as a go between happened to be on my 2.4 GHz network! Could there be a problem with the 5 GHz support in my router? Or in the Raspberry Pi 3 B (which is connected to the 5 GHz network). It's a mystery! I'm just glad I can scp again and there's at least a partial explanation.

Comments

Posted by Robert Bisewski at
Cool post, yeah I'm glad I could help you with this :) I guess a lot of routers just have firmware issues with these kinds of things? It would be nice to know more about the deeper details of the hardware.

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