[plug] sshd help (take2)

[Denis Brown]

Sigh,

Not quite as simple as I thought!   Okay, the situation appears to be that 
sshd sessions "hang about" in the process list so that even though the 
vanilla user logs off, if that logoff was un-clean for some reason(?) then 
the sshd process refuses to allow further connections.   For any 
user.   Consider:

After sending my previous mail I switched back to the PuTTY session for the 
vanilla user.   I was able to do some simple things (like an ls, and ps) 
and then chose to log out.   I then tried to log on again as the same 
vanilla user, only to be refused connection.   Then I tried another 
non-root account - same refusal.   Examining the ps listing shows that in 
fact the original login session is still in force, despite the fact that I 
terminated it!   So now I have
a) stale login session for vanilla user with a "good" looking ps listing 
(the [priv] and non-priv parts of the protocol are displayed)
b) the classic three [priv], [net] and [pam] processes that seem to spell 
doom for the vanilla user and
c) another three processes-of-doom [priv], [net] and [pam] for the second 
non-root user.

This IS starting to turn into a show stopper especially as I had hopes of 
remotely admin'ing the machine from home - while otherwise on 
holidays!   If I go to the console and as root kill the sshd processes that 
refer to the supposedly logged-out vanilla user then I can log in via ssh 
as either non-root user quite happily.

Thoughts appreciated.   Google is not too helpful on this one it 
seems.   The PuTTY website FAQ does mention the error messages but puts 
them down to Windows networking issues.   Okay I am not surprised but why 
now, when in an earlier life it was all working fine?   In any event this 
is looking more and more like a dyspepsia in Gentoo.    In case anyone was 
wondering, attempting login from another Linux machine (Debian as it 
happens) showed nothing helpful even with -v -v and -v as arguments.

Denis