Re: [CentOS] sshd gives false "Too many authentication failures"

On Sat, Nov 20, 2021 at 2:32 PM Andreas Fournier andreas.fournier@runbox.com wrote:

I just came across something strange with my fully updated Centos7 server. When I try to ssh into it the same way I've always done I get "Too many authentication failures". This just came out of the blue. I'm using the root account and a password. But in my sshd_config it still reads #MaxAuthTries 6 Which I think is the default.

From the console I can log in fine and when I look in the logs for sshd I can just see the the attempts I just made, that are less than six and no previous denied attemps.

Any clues what's going on?

I got the same error once. In my case the problem was ssh tried to log in with ssh keys before giving a password prompt.