SCP and Telnet between two Macs on same home LAN not working

Question

I have two Mac laptops connected to my home router. My machine is at IP 192.168.0.11 whereas the 2nd machine is at IP 192.168.0.13. I'm trying to scp a file from my machine (*.11) to the other machine (*.13):

scp ~/files/somefile.txt user2@192.168.0.13:/Users/user2

When I run this I get:

ssh: connect to host 192.168.0.13 port 22: Connection refused
lost connection

I try to see if there's even a plausible connection between the two machines:

telnet 192.168.0.13 22

Figuring SSH would be running for sure. This gives me:

Trying 192.168.0.13...
telnet: connect to address 192.168.0.13: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host

How can I troubleshoot this and get scp working?

Answer 1

You can follow following step in the remote MAC and enable SSH services. After you can try copy via scp command.

System Preferences pane → Sharing applet → check the Remote Login checkbox. This will enable SSH, and in turn, SCP.

Answer 2

You can start the service using the following command in the remote MAC laptop after you can try copy via scp command.

sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist