sshd[14074]: Did not receive identification string from

[Carme Torca]

Hi,

I have a lot of messages in the syslog.log saying:

ct 20 10:23:12 hpit32 sshd[14071]: Did not receive identification string from 192.234.123.4
Oct 20 10:23:14 hpit32 sshd[14073]: Did not receive identification string from 192.234.123.4
Oct 20 10:23:16 hpit32 sshd[14074]: Did not receive identification string from 192.234.123.4

What is the message's meaning?
Thanks a lot of,
Carmen.

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

Someone connected from 192.234.123.4 to your sshd port, but did not use any recognizable form of the SSH protocol, so sshd closed the connection. Perhaps 192.234.123.4 did not send any data at all, but simply terminated the connection as soon as it opened.

This might happen if you've set up a network monitoring system to periodically check that your sshd service is alive (although a check interval of 2 seconds would be overkill for most purposes).

The best way to find out for sure would be to find the administrator of 192.234.123.4 and ask him/her. If that IP address is outside your organization, you might want to use a firewall to block all unnecessary external access to your network.

MK