I encountered titled error when trying to ssh into my unraid server from another computer. I verified that all the ssh keys are intact, as suggested in the post below. I am very new to the Unraid/unix world so that I'm not sure what the troubleshooting steps should be. Any helps and suggestions would be appreciated! 

 

Start by posting the output of:

ssh -v Target_Host

 

Running on cmd, I got the following output

OpenSSH_for_Windows_8.1p1, LibreSSL 3.0.2                                                                               
debug1: Reading configuration data C:\\Users\\qcx/.ssh/config                                                           
debug1: Connecting to 192.168.1.207 [192.168.1.207] port 22.                                                            
debug1: connect to address 192.168.1.207 port 22: Connection refused                                                    
ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.207 port 22: Connection refused 

If instead running in wsl, I just got the single line of output that is the following

OpenSSH_8.2p1 Ubuntu-4ubuntu0.5, OpenSSL 1.1.1f  31 Mar 2020

 

9 minutes ago, Qichen said:

Connection refused 

I believe it's not even trying to check the keys, does root have a password?

26 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

I believe it's not even trying to check the keys, does root have a password?

It does. SSH doesn’t even prompt me for the password before it terminates the process and prints out connection failed so I wasn’t able to even put in the password. 

Have you done any changes to ssh behavior, like adding something to the go filed? Or post the diagnostics.

I don't think I changed any ssh behavior. I'm also not sure which part of the diagnostics would be helpful so I just attached the entired zip. 

host-diagnostics-20220625-0512.zip

2 hours ago, Qichen said:

I don't think I changed any ssh behavior. I'm also not sure which part of the diagnostics would be helpful so I just attached the entired zip. 

host-diagnostics-20220625-0512.zip 94.77 kB · 0 downloads

If I am looking at this right SSH access is turned of in settings->management access

&

3 hours ago, Qichen said:

I'm also not sure which part of the diagnostics would be helpful so I just attached the entired zip

Always include the whole zip as it is often not clear in advance which bits will include the key information for diagnosing a particular problem.

5 hours ago, jmztaylor said:

If I am looking at this right SSH access is turned of in settings->management access

I totally didn'ty realize its a simple settings element and is configured to be off out of the box. Thank you so much for the help!

This thread was useful to me as well. I never turned on SSH as I thought it was automatically ON. Thanks for the information.

For real, I'm here as well in 2024 wondering why I can't SSH or Telnet into my machine when other search results on Google say "if you don't have files or have zero byte files in config/ssh then delete them"... well I have files there, and they aren't zero bytes... and then reading that you don't need a plugin and SSH is built-in already, so you expect it to just work, right? Well, it will work after you turn SSH on in the Settings 🙃

I got the same Connect to host port 22: "SSH connection refused" error on Unraid. Turns out, SSH was disabled by default. I went to Settings > Management Access > SSH and enabled it, then rebooted. After that, SSH worked fine — no need for extra plugins! The SSH Connection refused error that is a method of securely getting access to the remote device or server over an insecure network usually over the internet. This encryption ensures that nobody else other than the sender and the intended recipient can intercept and alter information that is being transferred during the remote session. As, there many causes for the error to be occured such as Firewall Blocking SSH Port, Network Issues, Server Overload. You need to understand properly in detail for the fix of this error.

I hope it helps!

Edited June 9, 20251 yr by uskhina

What can you do if SSH is "On" in Management settings, and the files in config/ssh isn't 0 bytes?

I can login via http://192.168.86.2/login but I can't ping or SSH to the machine (no route to host)

ping 192.168.86.2

PING 192.168.86.2 (192.168.86.2): 56 data bytes

ping: sendto: No route to host

On 11/4/2025 at 3:52 PM, benjick said:

What can you do if SSH is "On" in Management settings, and the files in config/ssh isn't 0 bytes?

I can login via http://192.168.86.2/login but I can't ping or SSH to the machine (no route to host)

ping 192.168.86.2

PING 192.168.86.2 (192.168.86.2): 56 data bytes

ping: sendto: No route to host

I ran into this issue after updating to 7.2.2 (I jumped many versions at once) and found the solution to be turning off SSH in settings->management access and applying the settings. Then after turning it back on and applying my connections were all fixed