I change my computers a lot, reinstalling and trying new distros. I keep an Intel P4 box in the basement with the left cover panel off, with 4x 80 GB IDE HDs exposed. I simply switch the IDE cable to a different HD to experiment with another distro. The router keeps the same 192.169.1.106 number for the comp, regardless of which HD is used. But, the ssh function is always lost after I switch distros:

I think one of these files has to be refreshed or edited because I switched linux distros within the same box, and I guess new keys were generated. What do I do to initialize ssh, without removing ssh and .ssh and reinstalling ssh?

looks uch more like you simply haven't got sshd running in the first place. your error message is symptomatic of a tcp level issue. which is well well before anything application specific is relevant.

Gosh, how can that be? The command returns an ssh error message. "man ssh" returns the help file. it sure *seems* that ssh is installed. I have an .ssh directory with configuration files that wouldn't exist if I didn't have ssh installed.

The ssh daemon needs to be running to accept connections. The main cause however is that when you install a different distro, your public and private keys will be changed and won't match a remote computers known_hosts entry for your computer. If you delete the old entry you probably will be able to reconnect.

I'm referring to the known_hosts on the windows machine or other machine from which you are trying to make the ssh connection. Putty's or cygwin's ssh client will either have a known_hosts file or an equivalent.

The .ssh directory and response for 'man ssh' means only that the client side is installed. The server side config is usually in /etc/ssh. Look for a file called sshd_config. And, of course, read the man pages:

man sshd

man sshd_config

Also, check to see if it is running. Just because it is installed doesn't mean it is running. Check the running processes for the sshd daemon:

ps -deaf | grep sshd

Brian Pence

You were right. I solved it by going to Synaptic and installing openssh-server, which immediately solved everything. Thank you so much!

Thank you!

This was my problem as well. Being a linux noob, I installed a new copy of the the latest debian net install (below), but couldn't get ssh to connect from inside or outside the machine. Guessing, I thought it was some kind of port binding or firewall blocking me when it was simply not having openssh-server installed.

"apt-get install openssh-server" did the trick.

Linux carbuncle 2.6.18-6-486 #1 Sun Feb 10 22:06:33 UTC 2008 i686

Amazing. We lucked out.