I. Abstract
Some of you may already have experienced the same phenomenon. We wanted to secure one of our servers and disallow any password login. We configured the passwordless login to use ssh and use public-, private-key mode (see here) instead. But after having saved the sshd_config file, we eventually couldn’t reconnect to our Debian server from our Cygwin console. Instead we received a buffer error. The following lines show what we did and a somewhat not 100% clean workaround.

II. What did we do?

• we set up a Debian Etch server to use Public and Private Key authentication only (see here how to do it)
• we edited the sshd_config
server$ nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
• we set
  PasswordAuthentication No
• we saved sshd_config and quit vim
• we restarted out beloved ssh deamon
  server$ /etc/init.d/ssh restart
• we then logged out and found that we cannot login by entering
  client$ ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey root@somedomain.com
• arghhhhh…

III. Workaround

• we examined the errors:
  buffer_get_ret: trying to get more bytes 4 than in buffer 0
buffer_get_int: buffer error
• After fumbling here and there we just removed the known_hosts file on the local client
  client$ rm ~/.ssh/known_hosts
• we reauthorized the domain and guess what?
• The error vanished
• obviously the known_hosts was modified to have a line break somewhere in the middle of the public-key. I suspect openSSHp to have caused this incident

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