OpenSSH frustrations

I've written before about OpenSSH not working with an OSX box, but the troubles are bigger than that. I've had on-going problems transferring files from either a FC or Ubuntu box to sourceforge. Very strange. Poking around, there were references to DNS being an issue, and sure enough, if I use the IP address of the remote host instead of the host name, the transfers work no problem. What's up with this??? I check both the forward and reverse lookups with no issues. What would cause the stalling behavior? No clue.

It also appears that OpenSSH plays around at the IP level. It really shouldn't, being an application-layer protocol and all. I've used Jsch (http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/) to good effect and we all know Java doesn't play at the IP layer. Indeed, I have been using jsch to tunnel instead of OpenSSH.