I had this problem too for a while. It seems to be a permissions error in /dev with the ttys (depending on how you have them set up). My suggestion is to do the scp as root, which *should* have write access to the ttys. Of course this is only a workaround, and does not fix the problem, but if you have been rooted, you will be reinstalling anyway. If anyone knows how to solve the problem, I would like to know too, as I have had that pop up once and a whlie. Jay On Wednesday 06 March 2002 09:59 am, Raymond Norton wrote: > Need some advise. > > We had a major attack on one of our servers that I could not seem to stop, > so we brought it down. I had people fromthe newsgroup inform me it had > been rooted. Most of the advise they gave me was over my head (for now). > The log files showed I had stopped things, but according to the nasty email > from major Universities and the Navy it wasn't as stopped as I thought. > > I am in the process of trying to move my mrtg and RT stuff over to another > server. I am using ssh and scp. I would prefer to copy over whole > directories, but so far I can only see how to do files, which worked on a > test, but for some reason I get this error when attempting to use scp: > > scp admin at x.x.x.x:*.* admin at x.x.x.x: > server asks for password to admin at host1 IP > > I enter it, and get the following: > > You have no controlling tty. Cannot read passphrase. > lost connection. > > If I enter the wrong password, it will give me 2-3 more attempts before it > figures I am not going to get it right. > > If I enter the correct password it gives me the error I mentioned. > > I have used directory structure when attempting this too e.g > admin at x.x.x.x:/usr/local/mrtg/bin/*.* admin at x.x.x.x:/mrtg > > Any idea how to resolve this?