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markratledge
Asked: 2011-04-14 10:29:34 +0800 CST

SSH "connection refused" diagnostics?

  • 772

I'm getting a constant "connection refused" while trying to connect over SSH from OS X to a CentOS VPS with a WHM control panel. SSH is enabled in WHM, and I've generated SSH keys. I also tried SSH with the firewall off for a minute , but no luck.

After perusing other questions, I've run ssh -vv [email protected] and that gives me:

debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0
debug1: connect to address xx.xxx.xx.xx port 22: Connection refused

and running nc -zvw 2 xx.xxx.xx.xx 22 gives me 

nc: connect to xx.xxx.xx.xx port 22 (tcp) failed: Connection refused

What do these really mean? What else can I try?

ssh

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The port appears to be closed (or filtered, but you say you've already tried disabling the firewall - you mean the one on the VPS, right?).

    Can you please post the output of this command on the VPS if you have access by other means?

    netstat -ntlp

    It should list all open ports. Check port 22 is up on the right IP if you have several.

    Do you have outgoing traffic firewall rules on the OSX client?

    Edit: I took the liberty of running a port scan against that host and it doesn't seem to have a firewall up anyway, as many ports are open (you should probably close some or most when you can). SSH doesn't seem to be up though:

    Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-04-13 15:36 GMT+3
Interesting ports on ns1.resume-resource.com (72.249.28.26):
Not shown: 958 filtered ports, 31 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
21/tcp   open  ftp
25/tcp   open  smtp
53/tcp   open  domain
80/tcp   open  http
110/tcp  open  pop3
143/tcp  open  imap
443/tcp  open  https
465/tcp  open  smtps
993/tcp  open  imaps
995/tcp  open  pop3s
2200/tcp open  unknown

    Try /etc/init.d/sshd restart and check /var/log/messages for errors.

    • 5

  2. If you are getting "Permission denied", make sure that:

    1 - Your key is on .ssh/authorized_keys

    2 - The permissions on .ssh/authorized_keys are right. Do a chmod -R 700 .ssh to be sure.

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  3. have you checked /etc/hosts.deny? I once had the denyhosts daemon running by mistake and kept adding my laptop there, until I found and killed it.

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  4. is quite a simple fix and can be completed in a few minutes via the standard cPanel /scripts

    1. Login to your server as root via SSH
    2. Run: /scripts/updatenow
    3. Run: /scripts/fixndc

    This will fix your problems some of the time, but if it does not, do the following steps:

    1. Login to your server as root via SSH
    2. Run: vi /etc/rndc.conf (or vi /etc/namedb/rndc.conf on FreeBSD) replace all instances of “rndc-key” with “rndckey”
    3. Run: vi /etc/named.conf (or vi /etc/namedb/named.conf on FreeBSD) replace all instances of “rndc-key” with “rndckey”
    4. Run: /scripts/fixnamed
    5. Run: /scripts/fixndc
    6. If you received an error in the last step, run /scripts/fixndc another time.
    7. Restart named (on RH this is service named restart)

    If you are still having issues, try checking out the cpanel forums, or contact cpanel support for more help.

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