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I've had a server running CentOS for a few months now. A few days ago, I stopped being able to connect to it over SFTP. I've tried from multiple computers, OSes, clients, and internet connections. I can SSH in just fine, though. For example, Nautilus gives me this:

Error: DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply:
Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the
remote application did not send a reply, the message bus
security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout
expired, or the network connection was broken.
Please select another viewer and try again.

I was under the impression that SFTP was just pure SSH, and if one worked, the other would, and vice-versa. Clearly that's not the case, though. What could I have done wrong?

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Hmm.. there's not enough information to determine what went wrong.. could be a number of reasons.. what has changed a few days ago? –  sybreon Aug 28 '11 at 10:55
I haven't really done anything. It only runs Apache, and I don't really change things other than web pages. I hadn't SSH'd in for a week or so prior to this problem. –  Dan Aug 28 '11 at 10:58
Try sftp -v <user>@<host> from a terminal — it should at least give some useful error messages in case of a problem. –  Sergey Vlasov Aug 28 '11 at 11:09
Strange... That works just fine. Now I'm REALLY confused. –  Dan Aug 28 '11 at 11:29
Sounds more like a communication issue with Nautilus from what information is posted. Perhaps some other component is malfunctioning. –  Bart Silverstrim Aug 28 '11 at 13:44
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1 Answer

If SSH client normaly connects to SSH server, there should be file transfer normally available. It seems that problem is with your SFTP client. You can try to use scp (on linux) or pscp (putty scp on windows) to test file transfer and troubleshoot :) Also you can try to use FileZilla as GUI application for SFTP.

Note that there is also FTPS protocol which is FTP that uses certificates (like HTTPS)

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