"./sshd start" then nothing

[Christopher Nehren]

On 2005-03-09, Tsu-Fan Cheng scribbled these
curious markings:
>   I am trying to enable sshd on my freebsd5.4 prerelease (I didn't
> realize this when I cvsup the stable source). Anyway. I read something
> in the mailing list which said that I should go to /etc/rc.d, then
> execute "./sshd start" from there, this will make ssh-keygen to
> generate host key and stuff. I did this and there is nothing, the
> "ssh_host_dsa_key" is not generated. I have another box which runs
> 5.3, and it generates key when I did the same thing. I wonder where
> can it go wrong?

Do you have the following line in /etc/rc.conf?

sshd_enable=YES

You need this line, or otherwise sshd start won't start sshd. You can
use forcestart, but that will only start it once, and won't have it
restart at each reboot. I recommend reading rc(8) and rc.conf(5)

Best Regards,
Christopher Nehren
-- 
I abhor a system designed for the "user", if that word is a coded
pejorative meaning "stupid and unsophisticated". -- Ken Thompson
If you ask the wrong questions, you get answers like "42" and "God".
Unix is user friendly. However, it isn't idiot friendly.