This option is set to something fairly reasonable usually, in MacOS Mojave it’s set to 6 by default. Related to the error above is this MaxAuthTries setting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. So when this maxed out the SSH server limit, I got the error. So I never got asked for a password because my SSH client already offered a few SSH keys and remote SSH server counted each offering as an authentication attempt. There’s quite a few and SSH client was offering them one after another to the MacBook’s SSH daemon in attempts to log me in. So thinking about the error a bit more (and Googling around, of course) I realised that authentication attempts were made using SSH keys I have configured on my Ubuntu laptop. Something as fundamental as SSH client and server are rarely wrong in such basic things.
So yes, these errors happen when you attempt to log in using some credentials and you are denied access for a few times in a row due to incorrect credentials. Why Too Many Authentication Failures Occur The weird thing is that this was happening without any passwords asked, so at first it seemed really strange: you get authentication failures but you actually haven’t tried authenticating at all. Received disconnect from 192.168.1.200 port 22:2: Too many authentication failures
Here’s how the error looked from my Ubuntu 19.04 command line: :~ $ ssh I decided to capture findings here as a blog post.
Here I was trying to ssh from my XPS laptop to MacBook Pro for some quick command, when SSH started giving me the too many authentication failures error.