The SFTP Subsystem could not be initialized

Question

Hi,

We are getting the following error when performing sftp from local server to remote server:

INFO [DhFixedGroup] 16 Jul 2015 09:35:59.299 : Starting client side key exchange.
com.enterprisedt.net.j2ssh.SshException: The SFTP Subsystem could not be initialized
at com.enterprisedt.net.j2ssh.SshClient.openSftpChannel(SshClient.java:1095)
at com.enterprisedt.net.j2ssh.SftpClient.<init>(SftpClient.java:187)
at com.enterprisedt.net.j2ssh.SshClient.openSftpClient(SshClient.java:982)
at com.enterprisedt.net.j2ssh.SshClient.openSftpClient(SshClient.java:963)
at com.enterprisedt.net.ftp.ssh.SSHFTPClient.connect(SSHFTPClient.java:932)

May I know what are the typical causes for this error? I am able to perform manual sftp to the remote server via unix commands.

Answer 1

It's generally a server-side issue - the server is indicating it can't start SFTP. The server logs should tell you more.

Quite a few client tools will fall back to SCP if SFTP fails, so that might explain why they succeed.

If you can't resolve this, please open a support ticket here.