scp 'Ignoring unknown argument' at ESXi 4.x

[Marcin_Rybak]

I try to copy vm from one esxi 4.1 (VMware ESXi 4.1.0 build-320137) to another. They do not have shared storage, so this is the only option i have (without using second machine with fastscp).

when I try to pass a blowfish cipher argument to scp it says:

scp -r -c blowfish virtual_test_1 root@192.168.10.10:/vmfs/volumes/4cfd1702-a4395178-d9bf-00215ad490d2/backup_copy/
WARNING: Ignoring unknown argument '-cblowfish'

same happens when i try to pass a ssh_config:

WARNING: Ignoring unknown argument '-Fconfig_ssh'

while it should be correct option:

# scp
usage: scp [-1246BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]
           [-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program]
           [[user@]host1:]file1 [http://...|http://...] [[user@]host2:]file2

I thought that it can be a openssl problem, but none of ciphers listed by `openssl ciphers` works.

Thanks in advance for help

[Mohammad1982]

If you have a vCenter server then try and clone the VM to the new ESX server. If not then try V2V using a stand alone converter.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!! Regards, Mohammad Wasim

[Marcin_Rybak]

thanks for tip but, I do not have a vcenter, and I don't wan't to use seperate machine to do this.

scp without cipher works, but is slow

[jaymemaurice]

The SSH in the ESX command line is actually dropbear. Dropbear is a lightweight ssh client/server with almost no configuration. I guess they didn't have room for the real Open-SSH.

I tried various things to try and get it to respect my choice of cipher to no avail. In my case, I have a USB device on a Linux VM that I am trying to copy a bunch of backups to.

Can't mount the USB device directly in ESXi, can't TAR files over 2gb and can't copy the files at a decent speed with SSH.

ESXi seems to fail at being an easy to manage standalone hypervisor. One needs VC and a small cluster of machines to make it really shine...

In my case a physical machine exporting the USB device over NFS and cloning from direct attached datastore to NFS datastore probably would have been the fastest way... unless any one of the expected commands did what they were supposed to do.

/bin # ls -al scp

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 May 19 2010

scp -> /sbin/dropbearmulti

# ssh -h

usage: scp [-1246BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]
           [-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program]
           [[user@]host1:]file1 [...] [[user@]host2:]file2

scp -rp -c blowfish *ack* jayme@10.0.0.34:/mnt/
WARNING: Ignoring unknown argument '-cblowfish'

[jaymemaurice]

Actually, it may not make a difference for me in changing the cipher as my 7MB/sec limit is likely the passthrough USB support in VMWare where others are also complaining about performance.