Verbose messaging about why public key auth was rejected

[Matt Anderson]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 01:24:30PM -0500, Ryan Findley wrote:
> My question: is there a way to have ssh and/or sshd tell you WHY a  
> public key is being rejected (specifically the permissions thing)?
> If so, can someone point me at a good document? I'm using OpenSSH  
> 3.9p1 under RHEL4 (at the moment) and can upgrade if it's in a newer  
> version.

With RHEL another area you could have run into problems is with
SELinux contexts on the various files or directories.  With some
errors (such as those related to SSH's own paranoia) the cause
might be more obvious than with others, such as EACCES.  I think
you find that giving good hints to the user will be difficult,
and giving bad hints is more likely to send them off in the wrong
direction.

-matt