Sshd test fails no host keys available, but sshd appears to be running OK

Support Network
1

Hello,

New to Manjaro (2 days), so thanks in advance for your patience. Hopefully I am posting in the right forum.

As titled, essentially my mystery is that sshd -T returns sshd: no hostkeys available --exiting. And yet sshd appears to be running normally. I am making successful connections and not getting any known_hosts complaints on the client-side.

/etc/ssh/ appears populated with the correct, auto-generated keys (though I do notice the public keys are rw-r--r--, which I’ve seen trigger permissions complaints in other OS.

HostKeys in sshd_config also appear to be commented out. But AFAIK that is by design, as they are only supposed to be edited if changing from the defaults?

I tried creating a sshd_config drop-in unit file with just HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key. On sshd -T I then get a Unable to load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key

Is there something about the configs that are perhaps creating a false positive when running the test?

Ultimately just trying to determine if the test error can be safely ignored.

Many thanks.

3

There should not be any error.

The Host key need to be only readable by root. On my systems, if a private key is readable by others, I see something like this

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0644 for '/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
Unable to load host key "/etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key": bad permissions
Unable to load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key

The permission musst be at least 600, or the key is not used.

Just to be sure, you do run the sshd -T command as root? Not with your normale user. It is required to run the command as root or with sudo.

4

Yep looks like it was an ambiguous permissions complaint. That fixed. Many thanks!

5

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