SSH login failures

We have seen a few instances of SSH logins failing when using a password, but working fine with public key authentication. If you are experiencing this problem you it is most likely because you haven’t set up an MTA. Something (haven’t found what yet unfortunately) tries to call /usr/bin/mail, and if it can’t find it, sshd segfaults.

There are two solutions:

1. Install a mail server along with the mailx package
2. Create a “fake” mail by creating a symlink to true
   • ln -s /bin/true /usr/bin/mail
   • This is what you’d call a dirty hack. You should definitely go with choice #1 if at all possible.