Hello, I use HostKeyAgent with my sshd from OpenSSH 7.1. I accidentally discovered that if the agent is not started, then sshd complains: Could not connect to agent "path-to-socket": No such file or directory Could not load host key: path-to-dir-with-pubkeys/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub However, after that sshd proceeds to start normally. Moreover, when I start the agent, then clients can connect to the server without any problems. When I stop the agent, then sshd resets the connection. And then starting the agent makes clients to connect again. This behavior suits my setup very well as it means I do not need to worry about ordering sshd to run after the agent is ready. Still, if sshd really needs an agent only when a client connects, why it complains on startup or even tries to get the host keys from it? Regards, Igor