I wanted to git push some bits to a remote repo and set up this .git/refs/remotes/publish file: URL: git+ssh://www.example.com/some/path/repo.git Push: my-branch:public-branch So that I could "git push publish". The ssh on the far side is listening on port 1234 and not the default 22. So I slapped this into my ~/.ssh/config file on the local machine: Host www.example.com Port 1234 This worked great for a straight "ssh www.example.com" connection. However, git still complained that port 22 was refusing connections. It was. Git shouldn't have been trying to use it. So Junio suggested taking advantage of the fact that the default refspec uses git+ssh and use this instead: URL: www.example.com:/pub/software/linux-2.6-86xx.git Push: my-branch:public-branch Which just worked. So this is either a bug report or google food. :-) jdl - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html