Question

I’m trying to set up a Windows-based web server, but do the development work on Mac OSX. I installed freeSSHd and msysGit on the Windows server, and set up a repository where I want it. I also have git on my Mac and set up a repo there too. When I try to clone, pull from, or push to the windows repo via SSH, it gives me an error, “fatal: protocol error: bad line length character” It doesn’t matter what I set the remote to in my client (Mac OSX) machine – I can point it to a folder that doesn’t exist and it still gives me that error.

I also tried this on a Linux box I have sitting around and it works perfectly, so it’s not my Mac.

I have a couple ideas:

1. Maybe freeSSHd isn’t behaving correctly (as suggested here) so I could get a different SSH server for Windows – perhaps OpenSSH

2. Perhaps I’m typing the code that combines Mac and Windows file paths incorrectly. I tried:
   sudo git clone ssh://[e-mail]/C:/Users/[my_username]/[remote_repo_name]/.git [destination]

   and

   sudo git clone ssh://[e-mail]/C:\Users\[my_username]\[remote_repo_name]\.git [destination]

   I’m getting the same error with both of these.

Does anybody know what’s going wrong? Better yet, is there anybody out there that has managed to do what I want to do (push to and pull from a windows repository via SSH)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I have not done that kind of setup (my ssh server is a Solaris10 one), but I have found most ssh error while trying to setup gitolite.

1. as a prerequisite, gitolite demands that ssh user@remote git --version works
2. gitolite uses an interesting ssh configuration property, from the %HOME%/.ssh/authorized_keys file

You can not just copy your public key there (ie in “authorized_keys“), but you can also reference a script to execute for your ssh command:

> more authorized_keys
command="path/to/any/script/you/want" ssh-rsa AAAAB3N;...A_long_key..J6U19Jsf/kuO99XIrNE4ePzHw== username@pc_hostname

Meaning any ssh command you will try on that remote ssh user@remote dir will actually call that script on the remote (PC) computer.
(if it is a Perl script, it can then call system(your_command) to actually execute what you need)

From that script, you can display and control (and debug) any environment variable that might influence the outcome of the command you are trying to execute through ssh.
See .gitolite/src/gl-auth-command as an example of (Perl) script you can call through ssh (provided it is declare before your public key in your authorized_keys file)