Well, you can at least run "freebsd-update IDS" on this system to verify the base system, "pkg check -s -a" would check the integrity of files installed via pkg also.

It will only take a few min..

▲ QuantumNomad_ 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Neat! Haven’t tried either of those before.

While I’m at it I also took a quick look now at output of `top` and it’s sitting at 27 MB free RAM lol. So from that, out of memory is very likely the reason I keep having sshd die on me.

▲ ilikecode 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Try adding this to your /etc/rc.conf:

    sshd_oomprotect=YES

Then run

   service sshd restart

▲ silisili 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not familiar with BSD but does it not syslog oom kills like linux?

	▲	QuantumNomad_ 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		After rebooting the VM now, sshd died even when there was hundreds of megabytes free RAM available. So it seems I spoke too soon when I said it seemed to be for that reason. Previously I haven't seen much detailed reason for why it dies in system messages. But this time it said something very specific: > sshd[2036]: fatal: pack_hostkeys: serialize hostkey private: string is too large Which kind of sounds like one of the sshd hostkey files might be corrupt? And maybe it only triggers after a while becuase it happens when scanners try to connect to it and during ssh negotiation sshd ends up selecting a different hostkey type than the one it uses when I connect to the machine myself? I'm going to regenerate all of the three hostkey files on the server, and after that also disable the two that I can do without anyway.