When this first happened to me I thought it was just a one off oddity
but yesterday when I returned on the ferry from France I saw *exactly*
the same symptoms on two entirely different systems. It's hardly a
big issue either just an inconvenience but I'd love to know why it
happens.
On the DFDS ferries there is free WiFi available, no hassle, no login
required, just an open SSID called DFDS-Pax. My laptop (running
Ubuntu 13.10) and my tablet (Android 4.x) both connect to it quite
happily.
It's reasonably usable as well, hardly lightning fast, but fine for
browsing web pages etc.
However if I try and connect (from either tablet or laptop) using ssh
it starts off OK but after some hundreds of characters it just slows
down and stops never to pass another character. If I open another ssh
session from the same device the same thing happens, i.e. it gets
another few hundred characters through. It's not very consistent,
sometimes it doesn't even manage to complete the ssh handshake
sequence, but most times it gets to a command prompt and allows me a
couple of commands before going to sleep. Anything that generates a
lot of traffic (like starting up mutt) always hangs before it gets
anywhere but a couple of 'ls' commands will sometimes work.
So what might be going on? It's not like ssh protocol is blocked
completely so it's not that the port(s) are blocked, it's almost as if
there's someone watching and, when they can't see what's being
transferred, they stop the data.
Any ideas anyone? I suppose I could try a different port for ssh but
as it's not specific port blocking I don't think this will fix it.
... and as I said, it's not very important, I don't often want to read
my E-Mail while crossing the channel! :-) I'm just curious.
--
Chris Green