Cloning specific Git repo from inside WSL2 fails

[Joshua-Schroijen]

I recently set up Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat inside of Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2 on a system running Windows 10 22H2 on a secure enterprise network (with proxies and firewalls). It has been working really well and I seem to have full access to the network with ping, DNS, HTTP(S) and SSH. For example, I can install software using APT just fine. However, I am facing one major issue: I can clone some, but not other Git repositories. I have to clone repositories over SSH using key-based authentication, and when doing so for the ones I can't I get the following error message after minutes of waiting:

Cloning into 'Foo'...
client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe
fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly

Accessing the git server using ssh -T works just fine, as do nslookup'ing its hostname, pinging it and getting web pages from it using curl. I can clone some other repos from the Git server just fine.

I have tried all the commonly suggested fixes both in discussions here and on the broader internet, but none seem to work. Here is a list of things I have tried and that failed:

• Setting IPQoS to throughput and setting a ServerAliveInterval in ~/.ssh/config like this:

  Host *
     ServerAliveInterval 600
     IPQoS throughput
  

• Setting networkingMode=mirrored in /etc/wsl.conf and restarting the distribution (using the 8 second rule) like so:

  [wsl2]
  networkingMode=mirrored
  

• Increasing Git's http.postBuffer setting to 1048576000 (the repos are rather big)
• Increasing the distro's MTU from 1500 to 9000 bytes
• Checking and disabling the host system's configured firewalls

After applying any of these ideas I still get exactly the same error. Running Git with environment variable GIT_SSH_COMMAND set to ssh -vvv indicates the connection is setup and the user (me) is authenticated successfully, but just ends in almost the same notification that the remote end hung up unexpectedly.

On the same machine I can clone the problematic repositories through SSH in both native Windows, MSYS2 and virtual machines running in VMWare Workstation Player.

What could be going wrong here? How would I find out? I am really perplexed ...
I hope I'm not being too vague. Working in an enterprise environment I would rather avoid giving dumps of e.g. TCP traffic if at all possible, because I find it hard to "assess" what parts of such info are and aren't sensitive ...

Thank you in advance for your input!

[Joshua-Schroijen]

I figured out that using git clone --no-tags instead of git clone does actually work. Cloning our repo without the tags is undesirable, but the tags do seem to be the core issue somehow. We are using Tuleap as a Git hosting platform.

Is there any known problem with tags from relatively old Git repositories? And, if yes, what problem and how is it usually worked around?