trying to sftp/scp from HP secure shell to Protocal 1 via 3des???

[Keith Buck]

I have seen an error similar to this before:

invalid packet received: len 218778733 closing the offending input channel

It was an endian bug in the AES cipher implementation of openssh version 2.52(?) and prior (it only happened when connecting Intel to PA-Risc and vice versa). Even though HP-UX Secure shell has this bug corrected, it may be that the ssh implementation on the other side does not. (or, it could be a similar problem with another Cipher like the 3des you are trying to use)

The keyword "Ciphers" in both ssh_config and sshd_config can be used to modify the order in which the client/server try to connect. (May be different for some versions of ssh) Try adding this on one side or the other (see the man page for details) and see what happens. Alternatively, you could try upgrading ssh on the Cisco devices, but I don't know how easy that is.