When trying to apply patches to one of our ESXi 6.0 hosts I found I couldn’t connect to it using ssh. Stopping and starting SSH from vCenter didn’t work. Neither did disabling/enabling from the DCUI.
From my client I’d see:
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
So then I resorted to checking out the server from the console. First make sure I stopped SSH from either of the GUI’s.
Use ALT-F1 at the DCUI and logon to the host using your root account.
Then I tried to start sshd as a daemon using:
# /usr/lib/vmware/openssh/bin/sshd -D
Which reported errors Unsupported option running and Unsupported option PrintLastLog
So I editted my /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. Don’t know what caused it. But it was just a # missing from the first line. I guess I must have spannered it at some point when editing it to disable some ciphers. But the good news is using this method I can at least get some clear output from sshd -D to tell me why it wasn’t starting properly.
# running from inetd # Port 2200 Protocol 2 HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key UsePrivilegeSeparation no SyslogFacility auth LogLevel info PermitRootLogin yes PrintMotd yes PrintLastLog no TCPKeepAlive yes X11Forwarding no ...
So just to be safe I checked the other hosts and copied an sshd_config from one of the known good ones.
