'Too many authentication failures' nuisance

[rsbecker at nexbridge.com]

On Saturday, August 10, 2024 2:43 PM, Chris Green wrote:
>On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 10:34:45AM -0400, rsbecker at nexbridge.com wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>Tes, OK, but that means for all my default destinations I have to set the
>PreferredAuthentications, plus any that I happen to want to connect to
>occasionally. There's 20+ hosts in config at the moment.

True, but you can use patterns to account for that. Put the explicit hosts
first.