OpenSSH with 10.0.4 is broken. Here's how to fix it (according to Eugene Chan, posting at the MacNN fora). [His configure step is a bit different than has been reported elsewhere, for example at StepWise, because it was suggested that by an Apple emloyee who had the same problems with weird hostname/time-out quirks resulting from a broken getaddrinfo() in OS X.]

Create a place in which to work

We'll be downloading software from the Internet; here's how we create a workspace for ourselves.

% mkdir ~/install ; cd ~/install

Get and install

Progress marches on. The Apache web server provided with Mac OS X 10.0 has been superceeded. Here's how to build and install the current version:

% wget ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/openssh-2.9p2.tar.gz % gnutar xzf openssh-2.9p2.tar.gz % cd openssh-2.9p2/ % ./configure   --with-tcp-wrappers   --without-rsh   --prefix=/usr    --mandir=/usr/share/man   --sysconfdir=/private/etc   --disable-getaddrinfo % make % sudo make install

Now ssh should work, no longer giving you any Disconnecting: Bad packet length -2016317407 error messages.

Clean up after yourself