Hi Chris, On Sun, 5 Jul 2026 at 21:40, Chris Green <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have a VPS called isbd.biz and I access it using ssh. My user > account on both my local machine (desktop and laptop) is 'chris' and > my user account on isbd.biz is also 'chris'. > > I have account 'chris' on isbd.biz set up to allow login only using > public key authentication. > > The ip address of isbd.biz is 213.171.194.64. > > If I log in with 'ssh 213.171.194.64' I, correctly, get prompted for > my local system's public key passphrase and I can log in successfully. > > However if I try 'ssh isbd.biz' I get prompted for "[email protected]'s > password" which doesn't exist and I can't log in. Your domain also has an AAAA record, could it be that ssh is trying to reach that instead of the IP you tested above? You should be able to test this by forcing SSH to use IPv4, using `ssh -4 isbd.biz`. Sprinkle in some `--verbose` flags if you still don't understand what's going on, you can repeat `--verbose` or use multiple `-v`s in a row, e.g. `ssh -vvv [...]` to increase verbosity further.
> 'host isbd.biz' returns the correct IP address for isbd.biz so why > does ssh not work using the name rather than the IP address? Do you have some custom ssh client config on the machines connecting to your VPS? It should be in ~/.ssh/config or /etc/ssh/ssh_config , See `man 5 ssh_config`. If so, does any of it concern the host you're connecting to? > Chris Green I hope I could help, have a nice day, Simon
