mjhjmtu

I'm not able to ssh to localhost on my Mac. I found that sshd is not running in the machine (no process is running on port 22).

lsof -i:22

I found some posts asking to enable Remote Login in System Preferences -> Sharing. Eventhough it is enabled, I'm not able to ssh to localhost. The error I'm getting is this

$ssh -v localhost
OpenSSH_7.6p1, LibreSSL 2.6.2
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 48: Applying options for *
debug1: Connecting to localhost port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_rsa type 0
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_rsa-cert type -1
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_dsa type -1
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_dsa-cert type -1
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_ecdsa type -1
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_ecdsa-cert type -1
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_ed25519 type -1
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory
debug1: identity file /Users/gkumar6/.ssh/id_ed25519-cert type -1
debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_7.6
ssh_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer

Is there anything I'm missing here?

The log you are posting is showing that the secure shell daemon is running:

debug1: Connection established.

You would not see that line were it not; would instead see a more succinct log ending with Connection refused.

You are not seeing any output from lsof most likely because you are not running the command with sufficient privileges:

$ lsof -i:22
$ echo $?
1
$ sudo lsof -i:22
sudo lsof -i:22
Password:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
launchd 1 root 12u IPv6 0x2feb0cecf91e551b 0t0 TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)
launchd 1 root 16u IPv4 0x2feb0cecf91ec3a3 0t0 TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)
launchd 1 root 22u IPv6 0x2feb0cecf91e551b 0t0 TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)
launchd 1 root 23u IPv4 0x2feb0cecf91ec3a3 0t0 TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)

The echo statement preceding the second attempt is showing that the previous command returned an exit code of 1, indicating an error state.

Have you loaded sshd?

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist

I've found the solution for this

I tried to run the sshd process manually listening to a different port to debug the issue.

sudo /usr/sbin/sshd -d -p 2222

It showed the actual problem.

debug1: sshd version OpenSSH_7.6, LibreSSL 2.6.2
debug1: private host key #0: ssh-rsa SHA256:oECJtUeeA3sNrAQj3phBiuWJoVl00dzLiXi20tlWF/o
debug1: private host key #1: ssh-dss SHA256:uVnKrOK+4V+y3QalyFdqDz+9eBN4oi2E3wb1MDBcgzc
debug1: private host key #2: ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 SHA256:CWapRrGUSJx2doJkDf2YR/aZy4BJ4j9K1/ZwX4eUZcg
debug1: private host key #3: ssh-ed25519 SHA256:sjzAks0Hud+Ah941pd8ZRNO6MWENdhO8wW4NMNDL2Ns
/var/empty must be owned by root and not group or world-writable.

The permissions to the directory /var/empty were

drwxr-xr-x 7 gkumar6 sys 224B Aug 12 21:02 empty

So I've changed it to sudo chown root:wheel /var/empty

drwxr-xr-x 7 root wheel 224B Aug 12 21:02 empty

This has solved the problem for me.