How to SSH to an HP MSA1510i

August 22, 2010 by davidc

Symptom

david@netman1:~$ ssh -l admin msa01.storage
admin@msa01.storage's password:
shell request failed on channel 0

Cause

Some Linux distributions (in our case Debian) are configured to send locale environment variables to ssh servers via the following line in /etc/ssh/ssh_config:

    SendEnv LANG LC_*

The ssh server in the HP MSA1510i seems to crash when it receives these options.

Solution

OpenSSH doesn't seem to be able to override the SendEnv to remove it once it's been set from the global configuration file. So either:

1. Remove the SendEnv line from /etc/ssh/ssh_config, noting that this will affect all ssh clients connections from this machine.
2. Or, copy /etc/ssh/ssh_config to a new file, commenting out the SendEnv line, and specify this as your configuration file when connecting to the MSA:

   david@netman1:~$ ssh -l admin -F ssh_config_msa msa01.storage
   admin@msa01.storage's password:
    
   * MSA1510i Remote Command Line Interface *
    
   CLI>