LinuxHostingSupport

I have a server with ‘root’ access but when I tried to SFTP in with the SSH Explorer client, it came up with a “subsystem request for sftp failed” error message. When trying to SFTP in, the SSH (/var/log/secure) logs came up with the following error:

sshd: subsystem request for sftp
sshd: error: subsystem: cannot stat /usr/libexec/sftp-server: No 
such file or directory
sshd: subsystem request for sftp failed, subsystem not found

A user can SFTP in only when SSH access is enabled for the user, in my case, I was using ‘root’ as user and was able to SSH in fine.

On further investigation, I found the ‘Subsystem’ parameter for sftp is defined in the SSH configuration file /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

# grep Subsystem /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Subsystem  sftp  /usr/libexec/sftp-server

This indicates that SFTP is looking /usr/libexec/sftp-server file which is missing

# ls -la /usr/libexec/sftp-server
/bin/ls: /usr/libexec/sftp-server: No such file or directory

The solution is to find the actual location of the ‘sftp-server file and

1) Creating a symlink to it in the /usr/libexec/ directory
OR
2) Edit the SSH configuration file and specify the correct path to the ‘sftp-server’ file in the ‘Subsystem’ parameter.

Locate the sftp-server file:

# find / -name sftp-server
/usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

and create a symlink to the actual file

# ln -s /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server /usr/libexec/sftp-server

Restart the SSHD service

# service sshd restart

You should be able to SFTP in successfully.