Today I was trying to download some code via git, and I got into a strange problem. When I ran git clone, it simply reported cloning into 'repo' and was stuck there, until timeout. Same thing for pull. I could not understand what was happening, and it took me a while to figure it out but here is the solution, at least to my problem. Add this to your .ssh/config

Host *
  IPQoS 0x00

What was the problem? Here are the symptoms:

  • git worked on my NAS (Linux, connected to the router via cable), but not from my laptop (OSX, connected via WiFi)
  • ssh worked from the laptop. I could ssh to the NAS and to other external ssh machines.
  • However, I observed that the interactive ssh behaved strange when I ssh'd to an external machine. For example, if I asked for an ls, it kind of got stuck, and I had to press enter every time to get further data. It was like acting with a constant "more".
  • using GIT_TRACE, I found out that ssh negotiation was completely successful and it got stuck at invoking git-upload-pack via ssh.

Google didn't help. I changed versions of ssh and git, checked my router for strange setups, but nothing could solve. Until I smelled something about the way packets were exchanged. Don't ask me how I did it. I don't know. I just had the feeling that strange "enter to get more stuff" behavior had something to do with it. The fact that the laptop had the problem, while the NAS didn't, made me think it was either a OS issue or a NAT configuration issue.

So I started checking something about NAT, adding NAT to the google query, and here I found a post of a Dane who had similar troubles, apparently caused by the router messing up due to Quality of Service. This sounded just about right. Quality of Service influences how packets are considered for priority routing. I did more searching until I found this other post, where I found the solution given above.

It was a fun hour.