Comment 9 for bug 255292

Separately I recently discovered that OpenSSH's SFTP client will tend to give error messages like "received message too long 1397966893" when the data read isn't actually from an SFTP server.

This makes me wonder if something other than SFTP data is getting written to that channel (or whatever the SSH protocol jargon is). Non-SFTP data would tend to trigger this sort of error (i.e. packets with impossibly huge length prefixes).

It would help to know what the offending int actually is. In the "received message too long 1397966893" error I saw elsewhere, it turns out that 1397966893 is what you get if you treat the ascii string "SSH-" as a 4-byte int. If we knew what ints were causing the MemoryError/OverflowErrors for this bug, it might be a very helpful clue.