Tag Archives: Too many authentication failures for xxxx_username

[How to Solve] Too many authentication failures for xxxx_username

Leave a reply

Explanation

This error is usually caused by multiple ssh key verifications. Too many keys cause the server to refuse to accept the authentication request.

By -vparameters, output detailed process. You will find the authentication key you provided, the server refused the link, and prompted an exception: “Too many authentication failures for [user]”.

Solution

ssh-add -D

explain in detail

This is usually caused by inadvertently offering multiple ssh keys to the server. The server will reject any key after too many keys have been offered.

You can see this for yourself by adding the -v flag to your ssh command to get verbose output. You will see that a bunch of keys are offered, until the server rejects the connection saying: “Too many authentication failures for [user]”. Without verbose mode, you will only see the ambiguous message “Connection reset by peer”.

To prevent irrelevant keys from being offered, you have to explicitly specify this in every host entry in the ~/.ssh/config file by adding IdentitiesOnly like so:

Host www.somehost.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/key_for_somehost_rsa
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  Port 22

If you use the ssh-agent, it helps to run ssh-add -D to clear the identities.

If you are not using any ssh hosts configuration, you have to explicitly specify the correct key in the ssh command like so:

ssh -i some_id_rsa -o 'IdentitiesOnly yes' them@there:/path/
Note: the ‘IdentitiesOnly yes’ parameter needed to be between quotes.

or

ssh -i some_id_rsa -o IdentitiesOnly=yes them@there:/path/

reference