I have two boxes that are unwilling to properly communicate using ssh or scp. One is SuSE 8.1, and the other is AIX 4.3.3.

I can use either box to communicate with any other box under my control, and can scp files with no problems. Good speed, quick response, etc.

However, when I try to get these two communicating, the speed drops to around 5Kbytes per second and continues to drop over a 10 second period till the throughput is below 3Kbytes, then it stalls out.

These machines are on the same hub on a LAN, and should be able to communicate better than this. The ones they are successfully communicating with are being accessed via Internet.

Interestingly enough, when I add the '-C' option to compress, the entire operation *flies* along and completes.

I've seen this question all over the Internet, but haven't seen many answers, and none that have helped me. Ideas?

Thank you!

Unca Xitron

I had the same issue as this thread reported, and also found that using the '-C' option on SCP and 'z' option on rsync seemed to correct the problem as well. That just opened up my curiosity box, however, and now I am wanting to know why.

My situation was a bit different - everything was working fine to an off-site backup, but when the provider changed physical locations for his hardware, I was unable to complete an scp or rsync to the datastore. This has gone on a couple of weeks with no luck - I have tried different locations to upload from, different types of connections (wireless versus lan), even tried from different machines with the same results.

Why would compressing the data stream make a difference between success and failure - it seems it should work either way, though a bit more efficiently using compression. Any insight is welcomed.

Check to ensure that your speed and duplex settings aren't different on your servers/PC and/or switches routers.

I had the EXACT problem you describe. One of my servers had half duplex on a gigabit NIC set. It was a fast transfer at first but then would crawl shortly afterwards.

OK, so, from what you are saying here, the new environment hosting the hardware has different network settings than the old environment. I have no means of mandating changes on the other end, so I am stuck trying to get this to work from my end. And, it cannot be my router/switch settings either, since I have the same thing happening at other locations. Transfers at the office (both cabled and wireless), at a hotspot (wireless), and my home connection (wireless) have all behaved the same on this laptop. Any suggestions on what I might try first? The provider reports no other users with this issue.

Thanks again.