Unexpected behavior with "-o PreferredAuthentications=password"

[Jürgen Botz]

I currently have a lot of keys in my .ssh and this is sometimes a
problem when logging into a system where I have to use a password
because the total allowed authentication attempts are exceeded
before it gets to the password. So I had been using
"-o PreferredAuthentications=password" in those cases.  But I just
found that there's a gotcha with this... on a specific host that had
a pam configuration to use a 2nd factor (google-authenticator) I
kept getting "Permission denied; please try again." after the
password prompt and never getting to the prompt for the authenticator
code.  From a different client where I didn't need to use the
PreferredAuthentications option it worked fine.  Eventually I noticed
two things...

1) The password prompt was different; when I used
PreferredAuthentications it looked like "user at host password:", but
when I didn't use that option it just says "Password:" (note the capital
"P").

2) Using "-o PubkeyAuthentication=no" instead of
PreferredAuthentications resolved my problem.

It would seem that depending on those options the interaction between
sshd and PAM is different.  Is this is a bug, or am I missing something
about the semantics of 'PreferredAuthentications=password'?

Cheers,
- Jürgen