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Subject: Re: sshd refuses connections until I restart the daemon
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References: <CAKS+cu2aSY4qnoOVpNs-T6bELBpf5eJAG4GihRkzEEDOqkAXhA@mail.gmail.com>
From: Bruce Ferrell <bferrell@baywinds.org>
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Date: Wed, 9 May 2018 17:57:03 -0700
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On 05/09/2018 04:01 PM, Patrick McMunn wrote:
> I sometimes access my FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p9 box from my laptop via ssh.
> Sometimes I can connect, but sometimes I get the message "ssh: connect to
> host 192.168.0.71 port 22: Connection refused". But if I walk over to the
> computer and manually restart the sshd daemon, I can then go back to my
> laptop and successfully ssh into the FreeBSD box. Why would it stop
> accepting ssh connections until restarting the daemon, and how can I fix
> this from recurring?
>
Patrick,

There are a couple of entries that could be in sshd_config that might create this effect:

MaxSessions: 10 is default; other values do interesting things

MaxStartups:  default is 10:30:100; see the man page for sshd_config as it get's a wee touch detailed

Regards