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Re: path problems when logged in through ssh


Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 12:43:37PM -0800, David Rothenberger wrote:
> > I had a similar problem with ssh.  In my case, I couldn't even log in
> > through ssh because the spawned child process could not find the cygwin
> > DLL.  The problem was that my system PATH value was longer than 512
> > characters.
> >
> > The sshd daemon is supposed to copy its environment for the child
> > process.  Through debugging, I determined the child process did get a
> > copy of the daemon's environment -- except for PATH, which was set to
> > some useless default like /usr/sbin:/c/WINNT that didn't include the
> > cygwin directory.
> >
> > I looked at the sshd sources and noticed a limit on the environment
> > value sizes of 512 in the code that copies the environment.  Since
> > shortening my system PATH value was not an option, I solved the problem
> > by overriding the PATH value for the sshd daemon's environment.  I did
> > this by editing the registry for my sshd service, but you can also do it
> > by recreating the sshd service with cygrunsrv and specifying the PATH
> > value as part of the service's environment.
> 
> Just to claify here.  You're not talking about OpenSSH but of ssh.com,
> right?  There's no limit of the length of environment variables in
> OpenSSH nor is PATH truncated to some default value in thr Cygwin version.

No, I was talking about OpenSSH, not ssh.com.  I saw this behavior
on a machine with a PATH of about 600 characters.  When I tried to
connect to the server (with either openssh client or ssh.com), I got
a Windows dialog saying that the cygwin1.dll couldn't be found in
the path c:\cygwin\usr\sbin;c:\winnt;c:\winnt\system32...  Setting
PATH in the environment for the sshd process fixed the problem.  I
was running the same setup on two machines.  The one with the
shorter path worked fine, the one with the longer path did not.

I thought there was a limit because the char[] array for the
environment value in copyEnvironment() was 512.  (This is from
memory, so I may be a little off here.)

I'll try to do some more investigation and experimentation this
evening to see if I can isolate the problem further.

Dave

P.S. This occurred a couple weeks ago, with the OpenSSH package
released before the current one.


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