Posted by Circumerro Reporting on 04/18/05 05:42

I have a system that is using PHP to SSH(2) and administrate remote systems.

It is set up to both sftp and run commands. The trouble I am having is
that it has been very
unreliable. While it always connects without trouble, it will often hang
while reading
or writing to a stream. (When executing a command you are returned a
stream that is then
read to retrieve your response).

When it hangs and times out I am not getting an error. I have placed
flush commands all
over the place (output buffering is off), so I get a partial view but no
ending error telling me
what went wrong (errors are on). To add to my confusion, this does not
always happen.
Sometimes it responds quickly, fully and successfully. Sometimes it will
hang for a long time
and fail with no error message. Sometimes it will respond quickly and
fail with no message.

I have socket_set_blocking to false on streams coming off the remote
server. I am reading
and writing in 5120 blocks. I have tried setting up time outs on the
streams to have my system
error out before php does, but that does not seem to be fully working.

Sorry if this message is not so clear. I am actually hoping that
somebody has worked with
php's ssh2 commands and has had good luck and can recommend a direction
for me.

ssh2 is being loaded via extensions=ssh2.so
php used is 4.3.10
webserver apache2
the server software is fedora 3

To add to the mix, previously I was using PHP's standard FTP functions
and then had php
execute local perl scripts that made the ssh2 connections for remote
commands and it
worked very well and I never experienced an incomplete response like this.

Thanks again for the help.

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