Lately I noticed that when I want to ssh to a server using a password I need to specify -o PubkeyAuthentication=no or I won’t be asked for a password and the authentication will fail (well, for all I know, setting some other option may work too).
I use password authentication only once on freshly installed servers/vms, so it’s not a huge deal, but… it still bothers me (mainly because I don’t remember which option to set).
Do you guys have any idea what it may be?
client's ~/.ssh/config
Host 127.*.*.* 192.168.*.* 10.*.*.* 172.16.*.* 172.17.*.* 172.18.*.* 172.19.*.* 172.2?.*.* 172.30.*.* 172.31.*.*
LogLevel quiet
Stricthostkeychecking no
Userknownhostsfile /dev/null
Host *
ForwardAgent no
AddKeysToAgent no
Compression yes
ServerAliveInterval 10
ServerAliveCountMax 3
HashKnownHosts no
UserKnownHostsFile ~/.ssh/known_hosts
ControlMaster no
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%n:%p
ControlPersist no
server's /etc/ssh/sshd_config (it's from the nixos install iso)
AuthorizedPrincipalsFile none
Ciphers chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes128-ctr
GatewayPorts no
KbdInteractiveAuthentication yes
KexAlgorithms sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com,curve25519-sha256,curve25519-sha256@libssh.org,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256
LogLevel INFO
Macs hmac-sha2-512-etm@openssh.com,hmac-sha2-256-etm@openssh.com,umac-128-etm@openssh.com
PasswordAuthentication yes
PermitRootLogin yes
PrintMotd no
StrictModes yes
UseDns no
UsePAM yes
X11Forwarding no
Banner none
AddressFamily any
Port 22
Subsystem sftp /nix/store/78mv13w9mgh0s0rd7rnr6ff4d7a39bpd-openssh-9.7p1/libexec/sftp-server
AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys /etc/ssh/authorized_keys.d/%u
HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key
I did add a bunch of new keys to my ssh agent… this might really be it!
Yep, this is the reason. I have many different identity key files in my ~/.ssh folder, and for some reason ssh always tries all of those first, then exhausts the login tries and doesn’t ask for a password.
I have the same problem when I specify a specific private key file with
-i ./path/to/priv.key. If that key is different than the ones in my .ssh folder, it will use all those first before the specified one, and often exhausts login attempts giving a very hard to diagnose login failure. In that case I need-o IdentitiesOnly yesoption to tell ssh to only use the one I specified.Having 3 or more identities often causes authentication to fail before it gets around to trying password authentication (or even all the possible keys). Recommend configuring the client to turn off PubkeyAuthentication by default (so that hosts that you don’t have a key for will prompt for a password) and specify which key to use on the appropriate hosts using IdentityFile (might need to specifically turn PubkeyAuthentication back on, I don’t remember how openssh handles having a default host block with specific host blocks)