Why does my 'git fetch' over a cygwin ssh connection not work?

Question

I have two computers, say notebook and desktop . Both have cygwin with git and msysgit installed.

When I am on desktop and do a git fetch origin from the cygwin command window, everything works fine, as well as git fetch origin from the msysgit console.

But when I SSH into desktop from notebook using the cygwin SSH client and then do a git fetch origin from the SSH session, I get

error: could not open '//path/to/origin.git'
fatal: Could not read bundle '//path/to/origin.git'.

I assume it is a rights problem because the share I'm accessing is not readable for everyone but only for certain users. I think, when going through SSH to my desktop , I am not the same user as I am when accessing the share directly from desktop .

How do I get the correct user in cygwin to access a protected share?

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Edit: although it's claimed that this question shall be a duplicate of 'X' does not appear to be a git repository (I'm sure the path is correct) , I don't see any relations to that question.

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Edit: if that matters:

• cygwin git is in version 1.7.5.1
• cygwin ssh is OpenSSH_5.8p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8r 8 Feb 2011
• msysgit is in version 1.7.6.msysgit.0

Answer 1

Windows with centralized user management using Active Directory use Kerberos tickets to authenticate access to the shares. Since privileged process can change local credentials to specified user, logging in with ssh may not go through Kerberos though and in such case the you will be able to do anything locally as usual, but shares will not recognize you.

If you use public key authentication, it never goes through Kerberos and thus you will never be able to access shares (not accessible to everyone), ever.

If you use passwords, it has to go through Kerberos. I believe the system than does have access to shares, but I am not sure about it, because it's still not regular login from Windows point of view.

OpenSSH actually supports authentication using Kerberos tickets if compiled with the right options and linked against Kerberos library. However last time I looked cygwin ssh was not compiled that way and integration with Active Directory wasn't possible. But it was still cygwin 1.5, so it might have been implemented since then.

In any case, I'd suggest logging into the desktop with Remote Desktop Protocol instead. There are working clients for Linux as well. The downside is it's GUI, so it's not scriptable. You may also have some luck if you connect with RDP, so you are actually logged, put it into background and log in with ssh in parallel to that, but I didn't try, so I am not sure.

I also successfully used Unix Kerberos implementation to obtain the ticket from Active Domain (there are a few quirks like the domain has to be typed in uppercase, but nothing too complicated) and use the Kerberos support in Samba to connect to the shares from Unix.