SSH & Remote Administration

Stop SSH from guessing your keys all day long

🧩 The Challenge

You know that annoyance when you have five different keys in your .ssh folder and the remote server boots you for too many authentication failures? It’s a total pain when you’re just trying to hop onto a box and the server drops the connection before you even get a prompt.

💡 The Fix

Tell your local client to only offer the specific key that actually belongs to the server you are hitting. This keeps the auth handshake clean and prevents you from hitting that limit.

ssh -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa_prod user@server.example.com

⚙️ Why It Works

Setting IdentitiesOnly to yes forces the client to ignore the keys loaded in your ssh-agent and only use the one you explicitly specify with the -i flag. Without this, your client insists on showing the server every key it knows about, which gets you blacklisted on servers with strict MaxAuthTries settings.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Put this in your ~/.ssh/config for that specific host and you’ll never have to remember the flag again.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 8/31/2026