At 318, we spend a pretty good bit of time SSH’d into Linux systems from Mac OS X. Therefore, whether we’re loosing our color settings when SSH’ing into Ubuntu or unable to transfer files via SSH, when OS X has a problem with Linux/SSH, we notice it pretty quickly. One such problem that has come up since we started moving many of our client systems over to Lion is that special characters don’t work by default when using SSH. Which is funny because they’re so much easier to type in Lion.

This is due to a small setting in /etc/ssh_config. To correct the setting, open ssh_config in your favorite text editor. Then look for the following line:

SendEnv LANG LC_*

Then remove LC_* from the line. I like to use the reset command any time I make such a change:

reset