Comments on: Fix the SSH “Remote Host Identification Has Changed” Error

By: Kaedn

Kaedn — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:25:37 +0000

Wait, I cannot fathom it being so stragithofwrard.

By: John

John — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:31:15 +0000

ssh-keygen -R hostname

worked great.

By: Amine

Amine — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:34:14 +0000

Great stuff thank you!

By: Beaker

Beaker — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:57:54 +0000

If you do not know the line number of the entry to be deleted you can use the following command to delete the host:

sed -i ‘/hostname/d’ ~/.ssh/know_hosts

By: Anwar Khan

Anwar Khan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:30:00 +0000

thanks a lot guyzzz…it works..rm -rf .ssh/known_hosts

By: simon

simon — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:50:43 +0000

I agree, don’t crap on the poster for suggesting a fix to a problem advanced users have. I’ve been wondering how to get around this myself for ages, as I develop on appliances that always come up with the same IP, but unique ssh keys. I too was unaware of ssh-keygen -R host — thanks!

By: proctor

proctor — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:12:15 +0000

Tom’s advice is fine if you know what you are doing. There is no point in crapping on him. He probably presumes a higher caliber audience.
I only do ssh on a private LAN. Some of the machines get their address via DHCP. Machines come in and out of my LAN often enough that I get that infernal error. I used to be able edit the known_hosts file in other distributions, but now the entries are encrypted.

“ssh-keygen -R host” is the answer that I wanted though.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:39:28 +0000

In the case of server fail-over it would be preferable to use the same
/etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub
/etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub
on every identical server. Copy those files to each server instead of disabling ssh security features.

If there is a key error like this I have the server “admin” run
find /etc/ssh/ -name ‘*.pub’ -exec ssh-keygen -lf {} \;
and send me the output via e-mail. So I can verify that I’m really connecting to them.

By: Fabio

Fabio — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:17:52 +0000

Thanks a lot man! You’re tutorials are the best ever! This problem was bugging me a bunch today! keep up the awesome posts!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:44:01 +0000

Anyone know of a way to disable this check or have it automagically update the known host file without question? It breaks our server failover… i.e. When we failover to a new server, ssh breaks…