putty Network Error-Connection Refused

jfvet — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 18:49:04 GMT

VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 11925212

PuTTY Release 0.70

When attempting to connect to various ESXi 6.5 hosts receiving message: Network error: Connection refused. This is recent behavior, previously successful connecting with putty client.

System > Security Profile > SSH service running on host
Able to establish SSH connection by using localhost login on host
Able to establish SSH connection by using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.6, ONLY ONCE
- then will receive Connection refused error
- after rebooting ESXi host able to establish a ssh session through RHEL, but subsequent logins will fail
No firewalls between clients and servers
Followed KB (1039095) and modified /var/run/inetd.conf per article
Per Community Discussion modified PuTTY, Connection > SSH > Kex”. Selected “Diffie-Hellman group exchange” and moved to the bottom of the list, so it is not used
sshd.conf > MaxStartups 10:30:60
Nothing modified in /etc/ssh/ssh.config or sshd.config

I had installed Dell OpenManage at one point, but currently OpenManage server has been un-associated from the vCenter server and the OpenMange server is powered off.

Attached are the outputs from successful and failed ssh -vvv sessions.

Any ideas? Thanks

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putty Network Error-Connection Refused