Solved: Windows OpenSSH Problems

I did a search, but didn't quite see anything posted that might relate to my problem.

At one point early last year I installed OpenSSH on an xp business box I have at home. I set it up so that it was an automatic server that would start when the box turned on. I used Putty on my laptop, and through port forwarding on my WRT54G v8 router, I had it all working perfectly and could connect using Putty on my laptop to have a tunnel to my home comp. Last week the hard drive died and I just bought a new one to put in it, and went through the process of re-installing XP. I then reinstalled OpenSSH, put in all the same settings as it had before (detailed notes from when I did it the first time) and fired up Putty and it wouldn't connect. I thought maybe it was the box, so I tinkered and tweeked to no avail. The only firewall I have running is the XP, and I added OpenSSH and it's ports to the firewall exceptions. The ports are forwarded correctly on my router, and everything in Putty looks ok. After still more timed out connections I opened the routers incoming log and noticed that there were no requests to the port I have OpenSSH set to. I thought that this was odd, as I also have PCAnyWhere installed, and it works perfectly, and I can see in the log the incoming requests for that. So now I am stumped. I have tried Putty on 3 different computers, using three different connections, and still nothing. Any ideas?

 

When you rebuilt the PC did you put the PC to the same IP address on the router it had been? I am assuming you had it static on the PC before the rebuild and maybe now its DHCP?

Also have you completely turned off the Windows Firewall service just to test that as well?

Both seem strange if you get - "After still more timed out connections I opened the routers incoming log and noticed that there were no requests to the port I have OpenSSH set to" the information should at least be getting to your router.

The only thought i have is are you trying the laptop with Putty on the same network as your PC? Normally you have to be on the outside and trying to connect in so this could be why nothing is hsowing up if your not remote and trying to connect.

Usually I say use a local PC (in this case the laptop) to connect to the local LAN IP and verify it works then go for the router and its configuration.

 

Yes, I used the same static IP address that I had been using. I did try turning off the XP firewall service on the openssh server, and at the same time I put the router into DMZ for the static IP, and still no go. I do not have the firewall on my laptop on at all.

While at home, so that I didn't run into the possibility of it not working because I was connected to the same network, I asked my neighbor if I could connect to their wireless network, so I was on a different connection when trying Putty on the laptop.

Although I have not tried connecting withing the network locally. Would I just set putty to try and connect to the static IP while connected to my home network?

 

Ok, so I tried connecting within the network using the actual Static IP address, and still nothing. Just kept saying that the connection was timing out.

When I got to work, just for the heck of it, I tried connecting via Putty again, and it still timed out. So I logged into the router and looked at the incoming connection log and lo-and-behold, it showed where I tried to connect on the correct port, which really stumped me. So I looked online and found this and this so I thought I would give that a try. I logged into the box at home that I wanted to run SSH via PCAnyWhere, uninstalled what I had done thus far, and set everything up according to what I found above. Then I set things up on my laptop at work (which is on a DSL backup connection) and my work computer (which is on our primary cable connection) and both were able to connect with no problems. So, I still haven't figured out why my old setup wasn't working, but I like using cygwin, so it wasn't a big deal for me to do. Thanks for the help and ideas.

 

On a side note. I went to a local coffee shop and fired up cygwin with no problems for an SSH connection. Then, on a whim, I fired up putty just to see if it worked. And it did. Connected without any problems and worked like a charm. Unless someone has an idea, I am going to label it very odd and go on hehe.