potential sshd gotcha

[Tom Horsley]

I spent hours at work today getting sshd to function on
my desktop which I just switched to booting from the
fedora 18 partition. I finally discovered this:

[root at zooty ~]# ls -l /etc/ssh
total 276
-rw-------  1 root root     245058 Dec  3 11:43 moduli
-rw-r--r--  1 root root       2104 Dec  3 11:43 ssh_config
-r--------. 1 root ssh_keys    668 Dec  5 20:35 ssh_host_dsa_key
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root        590 Dec  5 20:35 ssh_host_dsa_key.pub
-r--------. 1 root ssh_keys    963 Dec  5 20:35 ssh_host_key
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root        627 Dec  5 20:35 ssh_host_key.pub
-r--------. 1 root ssh_keys   1675 Dec  5 20:35 ssh_host_rsa_key
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root        382 Dec  5 20:35 ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
-rw-------  1 root root       4615 Dec 26 14:47 sshd_config

The private key files now want to be group "ssh_keys".

If, like me, you've been copying your /etc/ssh host key files
from release to release in order to preserve your machine's
ssh identity, then you may not have the group correct after
the copy (depending on if you overwrite or replace).

Without the correct group on the hostkey files, every attempt
at an ssh connection of any kind results in a "connection
closed" error and much confusion :-).