Comment by cperciva
9 years ago
Not quite as obscure, but the solution to "I can list my tarsnap archives but I can't extract them" is "fix your broken path MTU discovery" -- listing archives accidentally avoids MTU problems because it doesn't send enough data at once to fill a MTU-sized segment.
I think thats the same reason why you can still do a SSH connection to a server with a wrong MTU setting. This helped me fixing a Synology NAS (couldnt access the web interface anymore)
SSH over wrong size MTU killed a lot of my time one day too. It took me so long to figure out what was wrong, when a few of the connections would be working fine while others would just show me a dead screen after a while. In the end i decreased the MTU on my machine and it stopped happening mostly, but would still do it every now and then.
Yes, "interactive SSH works but I can't scp files" is also a common diagnostic for broken MTU setting/discovery.