Failed to add the host to the list of know hosts

Question

Mac OSX Lion 10 7   In an effort to get around weird environment stuff  homebrew wasn t installing wget  and I had all sorts of weird blocks and errors   I uninstalled zschrc and homebrew and a bunch of other stuff  then installed fish shell   Now  whenever I try to push pull to from github  I get this error   The authenticity of host  github com  204 232 175 90   can t be established  RSA key fingerprint is  lt string of colon-separated chars that I should probs keep private gt   Are you sure you want to continue connecting  yes no   yes Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts   Users sasha  ssh known hosts     So I tried to check the permissions of my    ssh folder  and got this  which looks fine to me   -rw-r--r--  1 sasha  staff    97B Jul  9 22 56 config -rw-------  1 sasha  staff   1 7K May 16  2012 id rsa -rw-r--r--  1 sasha  staff   403B May 16  2012 id rsa pub drwx------  5 sasha  staff   170B Jul 15 09 56 known hosts   All that s in known hosts is a pem file I used for ssh ing  also with the  authenticity     prompt  to an Amazon ec2 instance  though I tried copying id rsa and id rsa pub there when things got desperate    Any idea what s going on  I d love to fix this so I don t get prompted all the many times I push pull   EDIT I followed these instructions successfully a while ago  so I do have my ssh keys on Github  and they re recognized  so that when I run ssh -T git github com  I get   Hi sashafklein  You ve successfully authenticated  but GitHub does not provide shell access    It seems to be exclusively my local computer that s unhappy with my ssh situation

User · Answer

it works with me when I tried the following commands sudo chown  my user  ssh id rsa sudo chown  my user  ssh id rsa pub sudo chown  my user  ssh known hosts

User · Answer

Okay so ideal permissions look like this For ssh directory  You can get this by typing  ls -ld    ssh   drwx------ 2 oroborus oroborus 4096 Nov 28 12 05  home oroborus  ssh   d means directory  rwx means the user oroborus has read write and execute permission  Here oroborus is my computer name  you can find yours by echoing  USER  The second oroborus is actually the group  You can read more about what does each field mean here  It is very important to learn this because if you are working on ubuntu osx or any Linux distro chances are you will encounter it again    Now to make your permission look like this  you need to type sudo chmod 700    ssh     7 in binary is 111 which means read 1 write 1 and execute 1  you can decode 6 by similar logic means only read-write permissions  You have given your user read write and execute permissions  Make sure your file permissions look like this    total 20 -rw------- 1 oroborus oroborus  418 Nov  8  2014 authorized keys -rw------- 1 oroborus oroborus   34 Oct 19 14 25 config -rw------- 1 oroborus oroborus 1679 Nov 15  2015 id rsa -rw------- 1 oroborus oroborus  418 Nov 15  2015 id rsa pub -rw-r--r-- 1 oroborus root      222 Nov 28 12 12 known hosts   You have given here read-write permission to your user here for all files   You can see this by typing ls -l    ssh   This issue occurs because ssh is a program is trying to write to a file called known hosts in its folder  While writing if it knows that it doesn t have sufficient permissions it will not write in that file and hence fail  This is my understanding of the issue  more knowledgeable people can throw more light in this   Hope it helps

User · Answer

Check permissions of the file  if it is good check parent directories  I had to correct   home sravindr  ssh permissions which worked for me

User · Answer

I think the OP s question is solved by deleting the    ssh known hosts  which was a folder  not a file   But for other s who might be having this issue  I noticed that one of my servers had weird permissions  400    -r--------  1 user user 396 Jan  7 11 12  home user  ssh known hosts  So I solved this by adding owner user PLUS write    chmod u w    ssh known hosts  Thus     ssh known hosts needs to be a flat file  and must be owned by you  and you need to be able to read and write to it   You could always declare known hosts bankruptcy  delete it  and continue doing things as normal  and connecting to things  git   ssh  will regenerate a new known hosts that should work just fine

User · Answer

Shouldn t known hosts be a flat file  not a directory     If that s not the problem  then this page on Github might be of some help   Try using SSH with the -v or -vv flag to see verbose error messages   It might give you a better idea of what s failing

User · Answer

This command worked for me    sudo chown -v  USER    ssh known hosts  as mentioned by  kenorb    The error was coming due to broken permissions  for the current user

User · Answer

It may be due to the fact that the known hosts file is owned by another user i e root in most cases  You can visit the path directory given   home taimoor  ssh known hosts in my case  and check if the root is the owner and change it to the default owner  Example  Error Description -  Before changing the owner -  After changing the owner -

User · Answer

to me  i just do this     rm -rf    ssh known hosts   then     i just ssh to the target host and all will be okay  This only if you dont know  what permission and the default owner of  known hosts  file

User · Answer

For anyone interested  this one worked for me in Ubuntu     Go to  ssh directory     cd    ssh  Remove the known hosts file     rm known hosts  Re-push your Git changes

User · Answer

This is the solution i needed   sudo chmod 700    ssh  sudo chmod 600    ssh   sudo chown -R   USER     ssh  sudo chgrp -R   USER     ssh

User · Answer

I generated the  ssh  key again and added to my git account  This worked for me   Please find following commands to generate the  ssh-key      ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C  your email example com   -  This creates a new ssh key  using the provided email as a label   Generating public private rsa key pair   -  When you re prompted to  Enter a file in which to save the key   press Enter  This accepts the default file location   Enter a file in which to save the key   home you  ssh id rsa    Press enter   -  At the prompt  type a secure passphrase  For more information  see  Working with SSH key passphrases   Enter passphrase  empty for no passphrase    Type a passphrase   Enter same passphrase again   Type passphrase again   -  Your key is generated  to copy the key     sudo cat  root  ssh id rsa-pub  Hope this works

User · Answer

In your specific case  your known hosts is a folder  so you need to remove it first   For other people which experiencing similar issue  please check the right permission to your   ssh known hosts as it may be owned by different user  e g  root   So you may try to run   sudo chown -v  USER    ssh known hosts   to fix it

User · Answer

This command worked for me   sudo chmod  x    ssh known hosts

User · Answer

For guys on Ubuntu  if you get this error      Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts   Then simply delete the known hosts file  and re-run your ssh  This will regenerate the known host file with appropriate permissions  and add the remote host you are trying to ssh into to this file

User · Answer

It happened to me simply because of broken permissions  My user did not have read nor write access to that file  Fixing permissions fixed the problem

User · Answer

I was having this issue and found that within    ssh config I had a line that read   UserKnownHostsFile  home  ssh-agent known hosts   I just modified this line to read   UserKnownHostsFile    ssh known hosts   That fixed the problem for me

[github] Failed to add the host to the list of know hosts

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