[Monotone-devel] trouble using ssh transport

[hendrik]

I'm having trouble doing an initial pull into a monotone data base on a 
laptop I've borrowed for a month or so. 
The laptop is the client, and runs etch.  I'm trying to pull from 
and AMD-64 also running etch.  

The lsptop is running the monotone distributed with etch:

sh-3.1$ mtn --version
monotone 0.31 (base revision: 1bd1fe1e811dce82bee09b9f0effca3225bd1cee)
sh-3.1$ 

and the server is running etch but with a recent monotone:

address@hidden:~$ mtn --version
monotone 0.40 (base revision: 5ccc279f9dea0444b47f03dd5291ecc985fcb7f6)
address@hidden:~$ 

**so the first question is: is there significant version skew between 
the two systems that could be causing trouble?

I issue the mtn pull command, which may be wrong in some subtle way:

sh-3.1$ mtn --db write.db -k address@hidden pull 
ssh://address@hidden/farhome/hendrik/monotone/write.db "com.pooq.hendrik.write*"

and it responds with

mtn: connecting to 
ssh://address@hidden/farhome/hendrik/monotone/write.db
address@hidden's password: 
Usage: mtn [OPTION...] command [ARG...]

  --confdir <arg>         set location of configuration directory
  --db [ -d ] <arg>       set name of database

there follows a long list of options, and finally:


Options specific to 'mtn serve':

  --bind <arg>         address:port to listen on (default :4691)
  --no-transport-auth  disable transport authentication
  --pid-file <arg>     record process id of server
  --stdio              serve netsync on stdio

Syntax specific to 'mtn serve':

Description for 'mtn serve':

  Serves the database to connecting clients.

mtn: error: I/O failure while talking to peer 
ssh://address@hidden/farhome/hendrik/monotone/write.db, 
disconnecting
sh-3.1$ 


Now I interpret the information specific to 'mtn serve' as an indication 
that the connection actually got as far as issuing the 'mtn serve' 
command, but that something was wrong with it.  Presumably it's a 
syntactic problem, because it's not being more specific.  Since I 
don't get to see the mtn serve command, I ask for help.

The data base is indeed on /farhome/hendrik/monotone/write.db.  The 
permissions in .monotone/... are 

address@hidden:~$ cat .monotone/read-permissions
pattern "com.pooq.hendrik.write*"
allow "address@hidden"
allow "address@hidden"
address@hidden:~$         

but I'm of course not publishing the secret keys here.

I suspect the I/O error message comes from the local mtn running on the 
laptop.  Presumably it isn't really an I/O error in the ethernet 
connecting the two machines, but some kind of higher sync protocol 
problem.

Any advice?  I suppose I could manually start 'mtn serve' on the server, 
and then use netsync, but it would be less convenient.  And *I'd like to 
learn how the ssh transport is supposed to work.

I'm reluctant to install an non-etch monotone on this machine unless 
it's really necessary, because it's not mine.

-- hendrik