January 23, 2025

Stupid Fedora ssh issues connecting to focus

The morons who try to make Fedora "secure" have no clue about people who need to work with older embedded systems. In general it is impossible or extremely difficult to get such systems to work with the latest and best ssh flavors. So when I get a message like this: 
ssh focus
Unable to negotiate with 192.168.0.131 port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa
It just wastes my time and makes me angry. This is far from the first time I have faced this hassle, and I am simply getting impatient with it.

What are we to do

I could spend a week or so and try to get a more modern ssh onto the target system. This is impractical and absurd. It used to just work and it should still "just work".

One suggestion is to make a special entry for the machine in ".ssh/config". And indeed it works to add the following for user "tom" on my linux desktop: 

Host focus
    HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa
    PubkeyAcceptedAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org