'Too many authentication failures' nuisance

[rsbecker at nexbridge.com]

On Saturday, August 10, 2024 10:13 AM, Chris Green wrote:
>I have several ssh keys in the ~/.ssh directory of my desktop machine.
>As a result whenever I try to connect to a system which uses password
>authentication I get the "Too many authentication failures" error.
>
>Yes, I know I can get round this by setting PreferredAuthentications but
this is
>rather a nuisance to have to do individually for all systems that use
password
>authentication.  It also means that I have to do it for a 'casual' ssh
access to a system
>which I'm unlikely to access more than once.
>
>Is there any way around this problem?

Have you looked into ~/.ssh/config? You can set per-host identify files for
your keys.
There is a Match attribute you may be able to use for patterns matching your
causal
use without having to specify individual hosts for other authentication
methods.