sshd refuses connections until I restart the daemon

[Bruce Ferrell]

On 05/09/2018 04:01 PM, Patrick McMunn wrote:
> I sometimes access my FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p9 box from my laptop via ssh.
> Sometimes I can connect, but sometimes I get the message "ssh: connect to
> host 192.168.0.71 port 22: Connection refused". But if I walk over to the
> computer and manually restart the sshd daemon, I can then go back to my
> laptop and successfully ssh into the FreeBSD box. Why would it stop
> accepting ssh connections until restarting the daemon, and how can I fix
> this from recurring?
>
Patrick,

There are a couple of entries that could be in sshd_config that might create this effect:

MaxSessions: 10 is default; other values do interesting things

MaxStartups:  default is 10:30:100; see the man page for sshd_config as it get's a wee touch detailed

Regards