hostbased failing and can't derive reason of failure in debugging output

[Carson Gaspar]

Does your hosts.equiv / shosts / known_hosts / whatever have entries of the 
form host.domain.tld. (with the trailing dot!)? If not, that is probably 
your problem. The current OpenSSH code doesn't strip off the trailing dot 
for hostbased. The developers have some reason for not fixing this, but 
I've never understood what it is.

-- 
Carson