Well in a desperate attempt to get ahead of the curve, I decided to update to FreeBSD 9.0 RELEASE before I put my new mailout servers into production. All has gone well except that on boot I get the following message:
Starting sshd. Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key
Why? well that file does not exist and there is no key of type ‘ecdsa’. We just need to create the required key, which os no biggy…
/usr/bin/ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key -N '' Generating public/private ecdsa key pair. Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key. Your public key has been saved in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub. The key fingerprint is: 0f:83:12:c5:7f:43:42:07:37:38:3f:4e:17:d4:cf:09 root@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xxxx.xxxx The key's randomart image is: +--[ECDSA 256]---+ | .. ..... .| | .. o.oE. o| | .. o o o.oo| | ...+ +.=| | . S. . o + | | . + . | | . | | | | | +-----------------+
Error now gone!