My last message was in error. The problem report I sent was after spending a while trying to figure out what was wrong, and in the process changed the system configuration. While trying to figure out the problem, I seemed to have figured out what's failing. Here's the observed problem:
I go to work. I ssh to my home server to check email. No problem. A few hours later, I try to ssh again, but it fails with the error mesage: ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host I then ssh over to another server and then ssh to my my home server - this works fine (see, I'm sending email now.) After playing around with killing/restarting sshd processes, I filed the erroneous report ealier about refused connections. It ends up that I sent that report while sshd wasn't running (except for the current session.) I reconfigured sshd to have verbose logging, and tried to connect. The log comes back with the folowing error: Oct 30 13:09:30 garrison sshd[17223]: warning: /etc/hosts.deny, line 15: can't verify hostname: gethostbyname(ATHM-216-216-xxx-203.home.net) failed Oct 30 13:09:30 garrison sshd[17223]: refused connect from 216.216.10.203 So, it seems that between this morning and this afternoon, my server can no longer verify my host. I have two qeutions. 1. How could this have happened? Something with home.net? 2. How can I securely fix hosts.deny so that it doesn't deny me? thanks
