'Too many authentication failures' nuisance

Chris Green
Sat, 10 Aug 2024 18:42:54 -0000

On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 10:34:45AM -0400, rsbecker at nexbridge.com
wrote:
> On Saturday, August 10, 2024 10:13 AM, Chris Green wrote:
> >I have several ssh keys in the ~/.ssh directory of my desktop machine.
> >As a result whenever I try to connect to a system which uses password
> >authentication I get the "Too many authentication failures"
error.
> >
> >Yes, I know I can get round this by setting PreferredAuthentications
but
> this is
> >rather a nuisance to have to do individually for all systems that use
> password
> >authentication.  It also means that I have to do it for a
'casual' ssh
> access to a system
> >which I'm unlikely to access more than once.
> >
> >Is there any way around this problem?
>
> Have you looked into ~/.ssh/config? You can set per-host identify files for
> your keys.
> There is a Match attribute you may be able to use for patterns matching
your
> causal
> use without having to specify individual hosts for other authentication
> methods.
>
Tes, OK, but that means for all my default destinations I have to set
the PreferredAuthentications, plus any that I happen to want to
connect to occasionally. There's 20+ hosts in config at the moment.

--
Chris Green