WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED

slash_boot — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:02:52 +0000

Sometimes when you change some of the IP settings, or are using a different wireless card on a machine that has been registered with a server, and for many other reasons, you might have encountered a warning which would’ve looked like this:

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@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
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IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
f2:92:1d:da:81:2a:d7:16:0a:48:f0:43:20:1c:f4:b5
………………..

The simplest way to deal with this is to remove the ~/.ssh folder, however this clears out all the exchanged keys with all the ssh machines you have ever communicated with. Removing the ~/.ssh folder would mean that each time you reconnect to a SSH server that you have previously connected to, you will have to confirm that the connection is secure and all that.

There is however another simple way to change just the entry for a specific server in question. At the terminal type in -

ssh-keygen -R name_of_the_server.com

name_of_the_server.com in the above example would need to be replaced by the actual server name that you are trying to connect.

Imaging and a little bit of OSS » remote host

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED