SOLVED: unable to load ssh2 protocol

[Kurt Lieber <debian@kirpatrick.com>]

Well, sort of solved.  I ended up purging ssh and reinstalling it.  (I had to 
do dpkg --purge, not just dpkg -r, so I must have had something wrong in one 
of the config files.)

Now, all is working well.

Thanks for all who replied -- I'm posting this in the hopes that it will help 
someone down the road.

--kurt

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: unable to load ssh2 protocol
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 09:42:31 -0800
From: Kurt Lieber <debian@kirpatrick.com>
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

After a recent apt-get upgrade on a woody box, I am unable to use version 2
of ssh.  (v1 and 1.5 seem to work fine)

When starting sshd, I get the following error message:

"Disabling protocol version 2.  Could not load host key"

Googling suggests that I need to recreate ssh_host_*_key, so, I did:

ssh-keygen -t dsa   and
ssh-keygen -t rsa

making sure that both of the resulting key pairs now reside in:

/etc/ssh/ssh_host_<rsa/dsa>_key

and ensured that the permission are correct.  (all files are root r/w.  .pub
files are world readable.)

However, i still get this problem.  I've tried explicitly entering the path
ot the keys in the sshd_config file:

HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key (and the corresponding entry for dsa)

but that doesn't help, either.  My daemon.log and syslog don't show any
pertinent entries.  Starting /usr/sbin/sshd -d -d results in the following:

debug1: Seeding random number generator
debug1: sshd version OpenSSH_2.9p2
debug1: private host key: #0 type 0 RSA1
Disabling protocol version 2. Could not load host key
debug1: Bind to port 22 on 0.0.0.0.
Server listening on 0.0.0.0 port 22.
Generating 768 bit RSA key.
RSA key generation complete.

I'm not terribly familiar with the inner workings of ssh, so I'm assuming I'm
doing something obviously wrong.   Can anyone help?

--kurt

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