Why I like Lunix

Today I am able to SSH into my two servers. They sit in the basement, quietly doing their work, mostly.

Last week there was a big flap about Debian != random so the SSH programs needed a serious update.  Something about brute force, regenerating keys, and the new-to-me SSH Blacklist.  Sounds scary indeed.

So I upgraded, beginning with my twin workstations just for practise.  Seemed to go okay although I had to remove a couple of lines from .ssh/known_hosts, as expected.

Then I logged into the servers and did the same upgrade on them.

Later on I needed to check something on portsmouth and was happily denied access.  But that's to be expected, no?  Rather than fuss around with it I simply went downstairs and checked on the console to get the necessary data.

Next day, or maybe second day later I thought I'd try re-starting SSH on portsmouth to see if that would let me in.  No go.  Went back to the basement where I looked around for keys.  Muttering to myself questions like, I know there are authentication keys for doing  remote, unattended ssh/rsync stuff but how could not re-generating those stop a plain old ssh user@host command? Well, I ran ssh-keygen anyhow and, quite predictably, I couldn't remotely log in to portsmouth afterwards.

Days pass.

I'm sitting at one of the twin Linux workstations, and once more would like to just SSH into portsmouth instead of schlepping my shoes into the basement again but SSH ... say, looky here in the process list: I'm logged into portsmouth and ashgrove ... how is that possible?

Flipping over to another virtual desktop, I find two SSH sessions, one to each server, and each with a week-old dialog box asking me questions about my SSH installation/upgrade!  Wow.  What a silly git!  After answering the questions, the week-long installation completes itself and now I am once more able to log into the servers.