Sshd suddenly stoped working

I am using Freebsd 5.4 and just now I was going to log into my server. Well when I did it just hung there, it never asked me for my password or give me an error msg. So I went and looked on my server and found that there was an error msg saying this:

sshd[779]: Fatal : Timeout before Authencation for <my IP>

I have absolutly no idea why this would all of a sunden happen, I tried other computers and I get the same result. I also rebooted server and it didn't fix anything. I have done any editing to the server for few weeks and it has worked every day till today. Any idea?

I just relized that it is doing something even odder now. It just let me log in, but it wasn't like it normaly was. It took about 3 mins for the ssh client to promote me for a password and once I entered the password it went straight in with no problems. It is doing this on all of my servers now actually from any computer. I am no longer getting the error msg on any of the server either. Any ideas?

I experienced the same. I would:

1. upgrade to FBSD 6.0
2. upgrade OpenSSH
3. make sure your sshd_config is right

I don't remember which option it is, but these are ones you might want to look at:


# Change to yes to enable built-in password authentication.
PasswordAuthentication yes
#PermitEmptyPasswords no
...
...
...
ClientAliveInterval 60
ClientAliveCountMax 3
UseDNS no

check you system too (ssh_config)

well those suggestions helped get the password prompt back to normal however now after I enter the password it hangs for a few minutes than finaly lets me in like normal. I have looked through the config file and everything seems right. Any ideas for this?

As I recall that's a documented issue, but I haven't found it again yet. I'll keep looking. Also what versions of SSH (client and server)?

for my client I am using: OpenSSH_3.8.1p1 FreeBSD-20040419, OpenSSL 0.9.7e 25 Oct 2004

for the server I have: OpenSSH_4.2p1 FreeBSD-20050903, OpenSSL 0.9.7e-p1 25 Oct 2004

The server is running freebsd 6.0 and the client is freebsd 5.4