If you’re like me, you might have a lot of ssh keys installed and this might prevent you from logging into servers with the following message as a result:

“Too many authentication failures”.

As far as I understood this happens due to SSH trying each key on the client for logging and failing due to hitting the serverMaxAuthTries in the SSH server configuration. I use the following quick fix to work around this, by forcing SSH to use a password instead of a public key:

ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no username@hostname.com

I’m pretty sure there has to be a better, more durable solution for this issue, but the above fix allows you to at least gain access to your server again. Btw I use this on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) with OpenSSH_5.3p1 Debian-3ubuntu4.