I can't see my remote branch

Question

While waiting for the sysadmin to set up the gerrit repo, I made my own branch. He just now sent me the address of the repo. I set it for origin and somehow pushed my last commit. Cloning the repo works fine, however git branch -r returns nothing. What is going on here?

$ git init
# made some comits    
git config remote.origin.url ssh://gerrit.mm-sol.com/branchname

$ git push origin SH1-of-my-last-commit:master    
error: unable to push to unqualified destination: master    
The destination refspec neither matches an existing ref on the remote nor  
begins with refs/, and we are unable to guess a prefix based on the source ref.  
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://gerrit.mm-sol.com/apps/phone-shaker'  

$ git push origin master
Counting objects: 85, done.  
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.  
Compressing objects: 100% (85/85), done.  
Writing objects: 100% (85/85), 20.95 KiB, done.  
Total 85 (delta 49), reused 0 (delta 0)  
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (49/49)   
remote: Updating references: 100% (1/1)  
To ssh://gerrit.mm-sol.com/branchname  
 * [new branch]      master -> master  

Answer 1

Try this:

git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"
git fetch origin

and then try git branch -r again.

In the future when setting up remotes, it's preferable to use the following command instead of git config:

git remote add <remotename> <remoteurl>

e.g.

git remote add origin ssh://gerrit.mm-sol.com/branchname

This will automatically set up both the url and fetch configuration.

Answer 2

Try to git push -u origin master