I am also having serious issues with sshd-host-config. I ran it right from the command line, from the built-in administrator account. It failed to start with no message in the Event Log. But, the /var/log/sshd.log said none of the keys were properly secured and refused them all. I chmod'ed them all, tried again, failed again. This time it was that /var/empty was wrong. I had just gotten done installing cygserver, so it was no surprise that cygserver (who had permission to /var/empty before sshd-host-config) no longer had any permissions. It was already started, however. So, I check and it was owned by 'sshd' and group 'Administrator'.
The problem was that the config program never set the required permissions. The message was "/var/empty must be owned by root and not group or world-writable." Nice, there is no 'root', so I renamed Administrator to root. Still no go. So, I changed the permissions to be very strict (700). You'd think that would fix it? Nope. So, I thought maybe it wants group 'root', too. So, I renamed Administrator in /etc/groups to root. Still, not working and same message. I then was getting all kinds of weird messages from 'ls' about group-id conflicts. It's getting worse, I thought. Short of removing everything and starting over, I rebuilt /etc/passd and /etc/group with mkpasswd and mkgroup. Then, I changed the owners to sshd again and group Administrators with mode 600. It fails again. I thought, "maybe I need to use elevated cygwin, rather than Administrator account." So, I tried all those steps with that account. Locked myself out of the /var/empty directory so I had to take ownership and start all over. I cannot understand how to do what it wants in order to start. Any help would be appreciated. I can send cygcheck.out if desired. This is Windows 8.1 ver 6.3 -- 64-bit. Cygwin (64-bit) is installed in a USB hard drive K:\cygwin and I recently did an update by running setup and not selecting anything new. I have run sshd successfully on Win7 computers and older. This is a new one for me. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
