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Too many authentication failures for *username*

Fresh7 days ago
Mar 15, 2026373127 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I have a hostgator account with ssh access enabled. When trying to upload the generated .pub key file with this command: I keep getting: I've been toying around previously with ssh until I got the auth failure. But now it seems that the auth failure counter does not reset (been waiting more than 12 hours now, tech support "supposes" it resets after 30 min to 1 hour, and another guy told me "it resets every time you try to login with the username", jeesh). This is driving me nuts. I even had this set up in a Slicehost custom server and had fewer issues than with these guys. Any tips? Perhaps it's something client side and not server side.

Error Output

rsync -av -e "ssh -p2222" /home/user/.ssh/key.pub username@111.222.33.44:.ssh/authorized_keys

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
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New Fix – Awaiting Verification

Fix for: Too many authentication failures for *username*

Low Risk

This is usually caused by inadvertently offering multiple ssh keys to the server. The server will reject any key after too many keys have been offered. You can see this for yourself by adding the flag to your command to get verbose output. You will see that a bunch of keys are offered, until the server rejects the connection saying: "Too many authentication failures for [user]". Without verbose mode, you will only see the ambiguous message "Connection reset by peer". To prevent irrelevant keys …

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