[plug] sshd help please!!

[Denis Brown]

At 09:30 PM 7/02/2005, William Kenworthy wrote:
>possibly PAM - a dev decided to make some "silent" changes that caught a
>lot (inc. me) out.  My problem was X apps, but I think ssh may have been
>caught up in it at some stage.
>
>Comment out the lines in /etc/security/pam_env.conf and see if that
>helps.

Thanks Bill.

But no, nothing changed for commenting out REMOTEHOST, DISPLAY and the 
XAUTHORITY one.   I should have mentioned that I am not running Xorg/KDE 
yet, this sshd testing is just at the text login stage (kdm not yet auto run.)

 From a clean reboot PuTTY *SOMETIMES* returns "Network error: software 
caused connection abort" and subsequent attempts all return "Network error: 
connection refused" which if nothing else, is consistent with the response 
from Debian's ssh client :-)

At other times though I simply connect as though all was forgiven.   I'm 
really at a loss.   Have checked the machine's DNS entry inthe UWA servers, 
have valid entries in resolv.conf, can ping the machine at either its ip 
address or dns name, and SOMETIMES could connect to the machine from itself 
but now refuses to even do that - with no apparent changes to config files!

By "connect from itself" I mean I log on to the console as root, then issue 
ssh vanilla at ipaddress  or vanilla at dnsname and ONCE I got a password prompt 
and was able to log in and work as vanilla, but no more it seems!  This is 
just wierd.   Adding -v's does not shed any light on things - it just 
refuses connection to sshd, inconsistently.   hardware bug?   Not likely as 
the machine's quite new and running cool - not being overclocked or anything.

(Shakes head!)
Denis