Thanks for all your responses. I must add that I am not a programmer, so all that the verbose stuff did not mean much too. I bit the bullet and started afresh - re-installed 5.2.1.
I find that I could ssh to the machine itself, okay - as KeS suggested. The process ends with the machine connecting to itself! What I still cannot do is to ssh from another machine (Laptops MacOS X or windoz) which I would really like to do. On the mac I get this $ ssh -vvv 192.168.0.5 OpenSSH_3.6.1p1+CAN-2004-0175, SSH protocols 1.5/2.0, OpenSSL 0x0090702f debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config debug1: Rhosts Authentication disabled, originating port will not be trusted. debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0 debug1: Connecting to 192.168.0.5 [192.168.0.5] port 22. debug1: connect to address 192.168.0.5 port 22: Permission denied ssh: connect to host 192.168.0.5 port 22: Permission denied $ The machine I am trying to connect to has NO firewall, yet. Pota _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"