After about 6-8 weeks, I think I found out why I was having ssh issues, originally just with ssh/putty/securecrt with 101b and then with 105b cvs via extssh (in Eclipse and IntelliJ). 98b never had any ssh issues.
Basically the ssh ciphers weren't matching. Just a quick recap. I could not login into our 101b OpenSolaris box via my WinXP using any ssh-based tools such as putty, securecrt, winscp, cygwin ssh, et al. Upgrading to 105b seemed to fix this problem. However we lost connectivity to our cvs server (via extssh) with 105b; Eclipse and IntelliJ were getting a weird "algorithm negotiation failure" error. On our box, the attribute "Ciphers" does not explicitly appear in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. The manpage says the default values for "Ciphers" is: aes128-ctr,aes128-cbc,arcfour,3des-cbc,blowfish-cbc, aes192-ctr,aes192-cbc,aes256-ctr,aes256-cbc. Instead of relying on the default, I entered these values into /etc/ssh/sshd_config and tried various combinations. After a while, I found this combination works: Ciphers aes256-cbc,aes128-cbc,3des-cbc. And it works with 101b and 105b. Not sure why the default wouldn't work. The Ciphers attribute is supposed to contain the *superset* of ciphers matching the ssh client. Perhaps the manpage is wrong and the default is *no* Ciphers? I hope this information saves others all the time I spent on investigating this problem. Frank -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
