ssh woes

[Bill <bill3@uniserve.com>]

Hi folks,

I've Googled myself blind over this one, but all I can find are
hundreds of people with the same problem and no real solutions.
I suspect the answer is staring me in the face but I just don't
see it.

While I can ssh from my desktop to my laptop, I cannot ssh from
my laptop to my desktop. However, I can ping the desktop from 
the laptop no problem. Likewise I can scp files to/from the 
laptop as long as I am working on the desktop.

When I try and ssh from the laptop to the desktop I get the 
error message: 
Read from socket failed: Connection reset by peer

Here's some additional output:

me@laptop:~$ ssh -vvv desktop

OpenSSH_5.5p1 Debian-6, OpenSSL 0.9.8o 01 Jun 2010
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: Applying options for *
debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0
debug1: Connecting to desktop [192.168.1.10] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.

debug3: Not a RSA1 key file /home/me/.ssh/id_rsa.
debug2: key_type_from_name: unknown key type '-----BEGIN'
debug3: key_read: missing keytype
debug3: key_read: missing whitespace
debug2: key_type_from_name: unknown key type '-----END'
debug3: key_read: missing keytype
debug1: identity file /home/me/.ssh/id_rsa type 1
debug1: Checking blacklist file /usr/share/ssh/blacklist.RSA-2048
debug1: Checking blacklist file /etc/ssh/blacklist.RSA-2048
debug1: identity file /home/me/.ssh/id_rsa-cert type -1
debug1: identity file /home/me/.ssh/id_dsa type -1
debug1: identity file /home/me/.ssh/id_dsa-cert type -1
debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version
OpenSSH_4.3p2 Debian-9
debug1: match: OpenSSH_4.3p2 Debian-9 pat OpenSSH_4*
debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0
debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.5p1 Debian-6
debug2: fd 3 setting O_NONBLOCK
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent
Read from socket failed: Connection reset by peer


And from the desktop side in /var/log/auth.log

Jun 11 20:30:26 desktop sshd[2575]: error: Could not load host
key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
Jun 11 20:30:26 desktop sshd[2575]: error: Could not load host
key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key

Any suggestions here?

	b.