Git Remote: Error: fatal: protocol error: bad line

Question

I set up a git server and want now to push initially my repo from the client. I used git push origin master and get this error message:

fatal: protocol error: bad line length character: Unab

I don't know what's wrong. I don't know what "Unab" is. I tried to resize the shell but it is still "Unab". I cannot find a solution for this error message.

I setup the server with "authorized_keys" and SSH. (I can connect to it, using SSH.)

It seems to be a git problem?

BTW: The server is set up in a Windows 7 VM

Answer 1

We ran into this as well.

Counting objects: 85, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (38/38), done.
Writing objects: 100% (38/38), 3.38 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 38 (delta 33), reused 0 (delta 0)
Auto packing the repository for optimum performance.
fatal: protocol error: bad line length character: Remo
error: error in sideband demultiplexer

I don't know the gitty details about what went wrong, but in our case what triggered it was that the disk on the server was full.

Answer 2

FYI I got this same error message after I upgraded a CentOS6 container to CentOS7 -- some git operations started failing when building the container, e.g.

# git remote show origin
fatal: protocol error: bad line length character: Inva

Running ssh gave me an error I could search on:

# ssh [e-mail]
Invalid clock_id for clock_gettime: 7

That led me to https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime/issues/63 where I realized I had forgotten I had a LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/faketime/libfaketime.so.1 in a parent Dockerfile. Commenting that out fixed the error.

Answer 3

For me adding the same host details into Putty with the private key (convert with puttygen) worked. Any git bash commands after that had no problems.

Answer 4

Late answer here, but hope it will help someone. If its a protocol error, it has to do something with your local git not able to communicate to the remote git. This can happen if you cloned the repo via ssh and sometime later, you lost the keys to the repo or your ssh agent cannot find those keys anymore.

Solution

1. Generate a new key and add it your git repo or configure your ssh agent to load the keys if you still have the keys with you & not with someone else ;)

2. Another quick fix is to go to your .git directory and edit the config file's [remote "origin"] url from git to http so that ssh keys are not needed to push and it will revert to asking your username and password.

   [remote "origin"]
   url = git@gitlab.*****.com:****/****.git
   fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
   

Change to

    [remote "origin"]
    url = http://gitlab.*****.com/****/****.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*