Unable to issue remote commands

sanitized

Thank you Greg, that was a big help. It's bombing out because of the "PasswordAuthentication=no" part. If I change that to yes and manually enter the password when prompted it gives me the drush status of the remote site.

However, it is producing the following while logging in:

Could not create directory '/home/MyWindowsUser/.ssh'.
The authenticity of host 'test.site.com (ip.ip.ip.ip)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is xx:xx:xx: etc.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (/home/MyWindowsUser/.ssh/known_hosts).

Is it trying to create this directory locally or on the remote site?
If it's on the remote site, then I don't understand why as it's using my windows username and not the linux username that I'm connecting with from drush.

I'm a little confused with ssh on windows and I'm not really sure what drush is using to connect... For example I have putty installed, but there is also an implementation of ssh2 that came with a GIT gui called smartgit. I'm not even sure there isn't another implementation which came with cygwin. I'm presuming that drush is using putty, but I don't know how to prove that.

Anything ideas about the above?

knic

Although this is all very interesting (!), I think you may have actually mis-read my post: I'm connecting from a windows (XP sp3) machine to a remote linux server, not a windows server.

That aside, your insightful suggestions have helped me along the way to solving my problem, so thanks very much for taking the time to reply to me.

Here is a key point for this setup in case anybody else runs in to a similar issue:

Setup:
Windows XP (SP3) box connecting through windows drush >> OpensSSH which comes with windows drush installer as far as I can work out >> remote linux server.

Problem: When trying to connect, the drush command prompt (cygwin in this case?) tries to add the remote host to the known hosts file using linux paths as follows:

Could not create directory '/home/MyWindowsUser/.ssh'.
Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (/home/MyWindowsUser/.ssh/known_hosts).

Solution: Add a path to the windows environment PATH variables, by right clicking on My PC, selecting properties, and then environment variables. You'll need to add a path name: HOME, and then the actual path to your Windows user. What I did was go to the directory where my known_hosts file is and copied the path from the file properties dialog. It should end up like: C:\Documents and Settings\YourWindowsUsername\.ssh.

Restart Drush and that error is taken care of. Hope it helps somebody. Caused me a good bit of head scratching.

---------------------

Now back to the problem of my remote aliases hanging.

If I paste at the command prompt:
ssh admin@test.mysite.com "drush --debug --remote-user='admin' --root='~/public_html/test' --uri=http://default --verbose st --invoke 2>&1" 2>&1

...it works, well it asks me for a passphrase from putty, or mysysgit, I guess, but it works.

However, if I use an remote alias with the following settings, it produces:

$aliases['remote'] = array (
'root' => '~/public_html/test',
'uri' => 'default',
'remote-host' => 'test.mysite.com',
'remote-user' => 'admin',
'path-aliases' =>
array (
'%drush' => '/usr/local/share/drush',
'%site' => 'sites/default/',
),
);

I can only think that it must be hanging because of that passphrase which is requested when I enter manually.
Now how to get rid of that...

All the best,

knic