In case your SCP, Rsync, or other sort of file transfer works for a short period and then suddenly stalls (permanently), then you may want to examine the MTU configuration on your network interface. After trawling the web for hours, attempting to find a solution to why an SCP transfer of one file stalls between server A and B, whilst the exact same file transfers fine from C to B, the answer finally ended up being the MTU configuration.
Curiously, the SCP transfers stall at exactly 2112 kB, which was thankfully my saving grace when I was searching. I’d gone through around 15 different suggestions - such as disabling TCP SACK support, changing maximum bandwidth on the transfer, attempting packet capture and more, before stumbling upon this StackOverflow question.
My networking configuration on the target server had its eth0 interface configured with an MTU of 9001 and the originating server had its set at 1500. To temporarily solve the issue, I used:
ifconfig eth0 mtu 1500
to change my target server’s MTU to manually match the originating server. Check your MTU configuration with ifconfig and look for the MTU details in the output.
From my reading, it should be possible for MTU path discovery to happen automatically and the MTU to be negotiated between the two hosts. However, this clearly wasn’t happening as the communication breaks at that point. The reason for this, according to the web, is certain ICMP packets (type 3, code 4 — Destination Unreachable, Fragmentation required, and DF flag set) are likely being dropped somewhere along the route, which leads to the scp command (or the target server) waiting forever for data that will never arrive.
I’m yet to ascertain whether the issue is specific to the route between server A and B, but I’ve since restored my target server’s MTU without issue.
As a side note, you’ll still be able to do things like interactively SSH to the remote host, likely because the problematic frame size isn’t being reached in such a low-traffic situation. Trying to push more data (like the file I was transferring itself) over the SSH connection also stalls.
Go Top
comments powered by Disqus