[ale] Authentication failed and ssh_host_key

[Joseph A Knapka]

Swantje Willms wrote:
> 
> Hi ALErs,
> I hope you can help me with a problem I have. I have made some google
> searches to find info, but nothing that seems to apply to my problem
> comes up.
> 
> When I try to do startx (as any normal user), I get the following error
> message:
> "Authentication failed - cannot start X server. Perhaps you do not have
> console ownership?"
> and a little later
> "giving up
> xinit: Connection refused (errno111): unable to connect to Xserver
> xinit: No such process (errno): Server error"

I don't know about that one...

> When booting, I get a failure here:
> "Could not load /etc/ssh_host_key check path and permissions".
> 
> Could the two be related?

Doubtful. sshd is not starting, but that shouldn't prevent
the X server from starting.

> I have checked and that file (ssh_host_key) is actually not there, but on
> my other machine it doesn't exist and that machine works just fine.
> /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key does exist.

Your ssh configurations are not identical on the two machines.
The path to ssh_host_key is hard-coded in the sshd executable,
but it can be overridden with an option in sshd_config
(presumably /etc/ssh/sshd_config in your case). Try
adding

HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_key

to sshd_config and see if you can run "sshd -d"
successfully. If so, sshd should start properly
when you reboot the machine, and you can start
it normally from the command line using just "sshd".
(The -d option makes it print debug output to
the tty and exit after servicing one connection.) 

> Usually we run Linux (Redhat 7.0) all the time, but just before the
> problem started we burned our first CD under Windows. Could that have
> damaged something in the Linux partitions?

You never know, but I doubt it.

Cheers,

-- Joe
   Any sufficiently broken OS is indistinguishable from Windows.

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