MaxStartups

MaxStartups
Specifies the maximum number of concurrent unauthenticated connections to the SSH daemon. Additional connections will be dropped until authentication succeeds or the LoginGraceTime expires for a connection. The default is 10.

Alternatively, random early drop can be enabled by specifying the three colon separated values start:rate:full (e.g. "10:30:60"). sshd(8) will refuse connection attempts with a probability of rate/100 (30%) if there are currently start (10) unauthenticated connections. The probability increases linearly and all connection attempts are refused if the number of unauthenticated connections reaches full (60).

Related

error: beginning MaxStartups throttling

36252 2026-07-13 11:59:35.408 exited MaxStartups throttling after 00:10:51, 436 connections dropped

Timeout before authentication for connection from

srclimit_penalise

org.apache.camel.component.file.remote.SftpOperations

disconnectOnBatchComplete=true

See also

• /etc/ssh/sshd_config(man): AuthenticationMethods, PubkeyAuthentication, PasswordAuthentication, PermitRootLogin, MaxStartups, sshd_config, AllowUsers, Hardening
• sshd, sshd logs, sshd -t, sshd -T, sshd_config, sftp, SSH_CLIENT, sshd changelog