Re: [gentoo-user] SSH won't restart

[Josh Cepek]

Grant wrote:
> I just upgraded ssh and when I try to restart I get:
>
> * Stopping sshd ... [ !! ]
>
> I don't see anything about it in '/var/log/sshd/current'.  How can I
> figure out what is wrong?  I'm a little nervous because I don't want
> to shut myself out of this remote server.
>

I had a similar issue after a previous update to ssh when I went to
restart it to get it to use the new binaries.  One of the nice features
of sshd is that your current session will say active even if you kill
the sshd daemon process.  Of course, if you get disconnected then you
will not be able to log back in, so it's good to do what you need to
quickly if you do need to kill (or if it's really stuck, kill -9) the
process.  When I had this problem I issued a `kill -9 PID_NUMBER &&
/etc/init.d/sshd start` - just be *sure* that you're killing the
/usr/sbin/sshd process and not one of your sshd login forks at the same
time.

Alex Schuster wrote:
> If you think the upgrade is necessary and don't want to wait until you or
> s.o. else has physical access in case sshd doesn't come up again, you
> could
> try to restart sshd manually by issuing a "kill -SIGHUP $( pidof sshd )".


I don't recommend doing this as it will also kill your current ssh
session.  If for some reason the SIGHUP doesn't take correctly on the
listening daemon you will find yourself locked and kicked out of the
server.  Use top or htop to determine the actual PID of the daemon only.

-- 
Josh