sftp subsystem on CentOS x64

I ran into a strange error when trying to use sftp on my newly installed and completely updated CentOS 5.4 x64 server. When opening a sftp connection to the server I got the following error:

Received message too long 1214606444

The sshd did not log anything to indicate what was happening. So at first I reinstalled sshd and examined the configuration to no avail.

I have several Solaris 10 and CentOS 4 and 5 servers and this was the first time I ever encountered this behavior. This was clearly an error only occurring on the x64 version of CentOS.

Consulting Google I found that I'm not the only one puzzled with this problem. But not all recommendations were accurate or up-to-date. What I found out was that the sftp-subsystem parses your login script (in my case .tcshrc) to set eg. umask preferences. If your login script generates any output (printing motd or other stuff) the error might occur. All 32 bit versions of OpenSSH on CentOS and 64 bit versions on Solaris (as well as SSH2 implementations) have shown no problems so far but this obviously kills the 64 bit version of the sftp-subsystem...

Strange... But now I could finally solve the problem by editing my .tcshrc and encapsulating all output generating commands:

(In csh / tcsh syntax)

    # set terminal to xterm emulation
    if ( $?TERM == 1 ) then
        set noglob
        eval `/usr/bin/tset -s xterm -Q -I` 
        unset noglob
    endif