weird svn+ssh cygwin echoing password prompt problem

[Chris Hecker <ch...@d6.com>]

I've been having weird problems with my latest installation of 
subversion.  I have a 1.1.3 server running on RedHat Enterprise (built with 
bdb 4.2.52), and the 1.1.3 binaries on Win32, with the latest cygwin version.

If I try to svn co svn+ssh://user@server/path/to/repository, I get prompted 
for the ssh password, and then prompted again, but the second prompt echoes 
the password visibly to the win32 cmd prompt, and it also doesn't seem to 
send it even if I type it in (visibly), because it then just endlessly 
reprompts, and you can't ctrl-c (you have to kill the ssh.exe's in the 
process viewer).

I can ssh to user@server just fine, so it's not the initial rsa key message 
mucking things up.  If I instead use plink.exe instead of cygwin ssh.exe 
and do this:

set SVN_SSH=plink -pw password

then the above co works fine and doesn't prompt at all obviously (if I try 
to use plink without specifying the password then it just hangs there with 
no password prompt, but that's never worked for me, so I assume that's a 
plink problem).

If I kill the ssh's, then do an svn info, the repository information is 
half filled out (uuid is there, url is there, nothing else).  But, I can 
then do an svn up and I get prompted once and it proceeds to check 
everything out just fine.

Also, if I use the plink SVN_SSH above, and get a working copy checked out, 
then I can clear SVN_SSH to go back to cygwin ssh.exe, and updates work fine.

Has anybody seen anything like this before?  I searched the list archives 
but didn't see anything (plenty of people mentioning the multiple ssh 
connections, but nothing about the weird echo/infinite prompt behavior).

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Chris

PS. I haven't tried using ssh-agent, I assume that would work because it 
won't prompt.  But the prompting used to (and should) work.

PPS.  Other commands that need to double prompt, like svn diff -r 
old_version somefile.cpp work fine (unless you pipe to cygwin less.exe, but 
that is probably another problem, it prompts infinitely, but at least it 
doesn't start echoing the password).

PPPS.  Yes, I'm typing the password correctly every time.  That's easy to 
verify since it gets echoed to the window!  :)


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Re: weird svn+ssh cygwin echoing password prompt problem

[David Ripton <dr...@ripton.net>]

On 2005.02.10 00:19:17 +0000, Chris Hecker wrote:
> Has anybody seen anything like this before?  I searched the list archives 
> but didn't see anything (plenty of people mentioning the multiple ssh 
> connections, but nothing about the weird echo/infinite prompt behavior).

No.  

Did you try similar svn operations from Linux?  Did they just work
normally, indicating that the problem is fully on the Windows side?

Does it only happen from one Windows box, or can you reproduce the
problem on another one?

Is there anything interesting in /var/log on the server box?  Tried
getting more verbose logging, on the client and server sides?  (I know
-v -v -v  for ssh; don't recall the corresponding things for PuTTY or
sshd, but they're probably there.)

> Any ideas?

Use ssh-agent.  Passwords get highly annoying, quickly, with svn+ssh.
Hardcoded passwords (like plink -pw $PASSWORD in a script somewhere) are
much less secure than ssh-agent with a good passphrase.  Spending a
lot of time debugging problems in the wrong solution seems sub-optimal.

> PS. I haven't tried using ssh-agent, I assume that would work because it 
> won't prompt.  But the prompting used to (and should) work.

Yeah.

-- 
David Ripton    dripton@ripton.net

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