At some point during setting up the slice I failed to scp into it. At the time I survived, using wget etc. This evening I returned to the issue. Well after nearly 2 hours of completely wasted searching I eventually got to the bottom of the problem (under Ubuntu Hardy if it helps). Basically, I had moved my ssh port and needed to specify the new address, I was using something along the lines of:

scp foo.txt -P 123 me@xxx.yy.zzz.aaa:/home/me

Eventually after examining the iptables log (in detail) I realised that the port wasn’t coming through, it was defaulting to 22 (the normal port for ssh), so I tried:

scp -P 123 foo.txt me@xxx.yy.zzz.aaa:/home/me

It worked. Great! Well I feel pleased I solved it, but the scp help file or program could have hinted that the ordering of parameters was an issue. Maybe I’m dumb (highly likely = returning to Linux after a long time)