[plug] can't telnet into Debian box

[Denis Brown]

A week or so ago I upgraded my Debian potato to woody and had problems 
telnet'ing into the box thereafter -- connections would simply be dropped 
or the target box would complain about a missing "login" executable 
file.  Several people helpfully responded but in the end, I did not pursue 
the telnet approach.

Revisited it today with the thought of going ssh/sshd and installed the ssh 
package.  Unfortunately I chose to support only version 2 of the protocol 
on the target and the other machines I used to attempt a connection used 1 
or 1.5 level.  This raised the interesting error message
Bad packet length 1349676916
on my potato machine and a hunt on the web suggested version 
incompatibility as the cause.  This was supported by the fact that I could 
ssh into the target box from itself (ie from the console, do a ssh -l 
username hostname) without grief.

Attempting to reconfigure the existing installation to include both version 
1 and 2 protocols did not work for me, doubtless because of my lack of 
experience.  But in Linux there are many ways...  so I used
dpkg --remove ssh    and
dpkg --purge ssh      followed by
dpkg --install ssh   Then went correctly through the configuration list 
this time and hey presto, success.

I mention this in the hope that it might save some other less-experienced 
Linux user a few moments of concern, as well as to trigger responses as to 
better / simpler / smarter ways to achieve the same end.

Regards and thanks for the help,
Denis