How to fix error: Received Too Large SFTP Packet – While Accessing VMWare vCenter

While attempting to access VMWare vCenter using WinSCP I received a pop up error:

“Received too large (173753682 B) SFTP packet. Max supported packet size is 1024000 B.”

“The error is typically caused by message printed from startup script (like .profile). The message may start with “\n[ER”. “

“Cannot initialize SFTP protocol. Is the host running an SFTP server?”

Or error may contain:

”The error is typically caused by message printed from startup script (like .profile). The message may start with :Unkn”‘

Luckily, VMWare already has a Knowledge Base article KB2115983 with a very simple solution. It states that this is a known issue that affects vCenter 6.0 and up.

Change the shell from appliancesh to bash

Our first step is to ssh into the vCenter using Putty or your favorite terminal emulator, in my case it’s SecureCRT, but the results are the same.

If this is your first time to access SSH on vCenter you may need to enable it at the console inside the web interface console view of the vCenter VM itself. You can take a look at how to do this on my How to enable SSH access into VMWare vCenter.

You will login as username: root and the password is whatever you set the password to be. The next step is to enter into a shell prompt by typing: shell

Here we will need to change the shell from appliancesh to bash by entering the shell command:

chsh -s /bin/bash root

After you have entered the command you can now use WinSCP to access vCenter without getting the error of “too large packet error.”

Once you have completed you access of the files on your vCenter, you can undo the changes to return to the Appliance Shell, by running this command:

chsh -s /bin/appliancesh root

Of course when you need to access vCenter using WinSCP again and you forgot how to do it, just come back by and this page will be here waiting!