git protocol over port-forwarding

We are attempting to use the git protocol throughout our company, as it saves ssh-related problems of permissions and umasks for a our poorly-administered community of developers, engineers, and others.

This fails, and I was wondering if anyone has any experience using port-forwarding and the git protocol, or if it is not presently possible.

Here's how we set things up ("source" is where git-daemon runs, and "xiphi" is a client machine):

On the source machine, which is running the git daemon, and listening on port 9418, I set up this ssh config entry in my ~/.ssh/config file:

Host xiphi-git
     Protocol 2
     ForwardX11 yes
     Hostname xiphi.lsscorp.com
     RemoteForward 5700 localhost:9418
     HostKeyAlias xiphi-git

Then on source, I ssh to xiphi-git, which connects to xiphi and sets up a portforwarding from xiphi:9418 back to source:9418. Then, on xiphi:

xiphi:~/y % git clone git://localhost:5700/fusion Initialized empty Git repository in /home/furnish/y/fusion/.git/ fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly fetch-pack from 'git://localhost:5700/fusion' failed.

So, we are wondering if perhaps the git daemon could be jiggered to work somehow, or if there are other options for us.

Bill