While setting up ssh on my home network, connecting from my Ubuntu 11.10 laptop to my Fedora 12 desktop machine I got this error even though the userid and password given were correct.

I'm using minimal sshd options on both machines, except for the following /etc/ssh/sshd_config contents:

Port xxxx
AddressFamily inet
Protocol 2
SyslogFacility AUTHPRIV
ServerKeyBits 2048
Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

The interesting thing is this: (1) The Ubuntu 11.10 setup allowed keyboard-interactive login (and so I was able to ssh-copy-id my key over to it), but the Fedora 12 setup rejected all login attempts. (2) Debugging by: stopping the service on Fedora 12 and running /usr/sbin/ssh -d as root from the command line, allowed login.

Using this work-around, I was able to ssh-copy-id my key to Fedora 12, from whence on the ssh id key login is used and works.

Weird, huh!?!?
- Mike

Not a networking question, moved to Linux - software.

Apart from you using a deprecated version of Fedora (please install the current release) there is nothing (weird): no configuration, no log excerpts, no diagnostics. Restarting a service isn't debugging and a debugging service only matters if debug output tells you what to fix.