Hello,

Until yesterday I was able to ssh to servers B,C,D,E from my home computer (A).

But since today, I keep getting the message:
ssh: connect to host C port 22: Network is unreachable
This ONLY happens when I try to ssh from A to C,D,E. If I try to ssh from A to B it works as usual.

Also, if I ssh from A to B and then, from B to C,D,E, everything works as usual. A is behind a router, by the way.

The servers to which I cannot ssh directly (C,D,E) are all part of the same network (servers in the same institution). Server B is in another institution.

Do you have any suggestion to solve this problem? Please be detailed in you explanations or questions; I am new to ssh and networks, so I am not familiar with the terminology.

Thank you very much

In case it matters: A is running Fedora 14, B is running OpenSUSE 11.2, C is running Ubuntu 11.04, D is running Fedora 13, E is running Fedora 8. I have admin access to A and C.

Hello.
I'm sure, the reason is not in SSH, it's in routing. :-)

You may try to add an entry to your routing table (at host A), to specify exactly the destination network (C, D, E hosts) and the gateway for it (B-router).

Another reason is that somebody changed the firewall rules on the B-router.

If you don't keep it in a secret, you may also show us your routing table and tell the network address of C, D and E hosts.

I'm not sure if I understand correctly. B is not a router, it's just another server like C,D,E. The router causes no trouble when I try to connect to B. Also, until yesterday the router didn't cause trouble when I tried to connect to C,D,E either. I want to be able to connect from A to C,D,E directly again (without using B).

I am very confused by this. After leaving my home computer (A) for some hours, I can now connect from A to C,E. But it takes about 20 seconds to ask for my password! But after putting my password, everything seems to work fine. On the other hand, if I ssh from A to B and then from B to C,E, it takes less than a second to ask for my password. If I try to ssh from A to D, it now says
"ssh: Could not resolve hostname D: Name or service not known", but I can ssh from A to B and from B to D.

By the way, B is 13000 miles away from A. C,D,E are just 5 miles away from A.

I am not familiar with the terms "routing table", "gateway". I will google how to find those and will post them.

Thank you

Here is the routing table in A:

[alan@fedora ~]$ route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth0
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 2 0 0 eth1
0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

Here is more information:

The exact same problem is present when I use a laptop behind the same router as computer A.

"Could not resolve" errors are generally due to DNS issues ... are you SSH'ing by FQDN* or by IP address? Dumping the IP/hostname pair into your /etc/hosts file may speed up the connection. Also, you can install nscd which will cache host names with a "yum install nscd -y; service nscd start; chkconfig nscd on".

Also, check to make sure your DHCP server (or router) is handing out the correct DNS entries, or put the entries in your /etc/resolv.conf file manually to expedite DNS lookups. For example you should have a line in /etc/resolv.conf that reads something like this:

nameserver <IP.given.by.your.ISP>

The DNS IP is usually given automatically by DHCP, but may not be in case your DHCP server isn't 100% setup correctly.

HTH

FQDN = fully qualified domain name (i.e. hostname.somedomain.com)