I know I am not directly answering your question, but have you thought of building dropbear v2017.75 on your PC and use dbclient to connect (instead of ssh) to your VPS ? If you must use openssh, I would look into the ssh client settings to see if there is some sort of configurable parameters that restricts some of the functionalities (e.g. GSSAPIKexAlgorithms, HostKeyAlgorithms, ...) My 5 cents... Fabrizio
On Sat, Jun 25, 2022 at 1:56 AM James Miller <gajs-f...@dea.spamcon.org> wrote: > I set up a small low-resource VPS a few years ago to use mainly as a > light-use xmpp server. I got Dropbear operating there so I could admin it. > Dropbear seemed a good choice since system resources were so anemic. I > recall it being quite challenging to get key-pair authentication to > finally work there, though I can't recall many details about how I finally > succeeded. > > Sometime during the interval after I set that up, key-pair authentication > has stopped working again. So I've had to re-enable username/password > authentication. I'm now trying to determine why it happened that the > key-pair authentication stopped working and am hoping I can somehow > re-enable it. > > The VPS runs Ubuntu 16.04 (EMS), so the version of Dropbear there is a bit > outdated (v2017.75). Since that release was made, various changes have > happened to openssh that may, I assume, make it incompatible with this > version of Dropbear. I am using ssh when I try to connect to the VPS, btw. > > So I'd like to start off by just asking whether the challenges I am > encountering as I try to re-enable key-pair authentication are likely > related to the version mismatch between the Dropbear I have installed on > the VPS and the much more current version of openssh I have on the home > computer from which I'm trying to connect? > > Input on that question will be appreciated. If it seems unreasonable to > expect modern versions of openssh to interoperate with a Dropbear server > dating to 2017, I will need to just give up on it and seek some other > solution. > > Thank you >
