A few minutes ago I was unable to make a connection to my server with ssh. All other services were working. To my luck I forgot to shutdown webmin yesterday and was able to restart ssh. I'm interested how do you make sure you have always admin access to your server. Do you restart ssh by cron every day? Mine was running since 8 Apr, maybe it was too long.

- dom

Perharps I misuderstand your question, but why do you need to shut down sshd? I always have sshd running so that I can login/admin to my server anytime ...

cheers,
:beer:

My sshd process is also running all the time but today I wasn't able to login (make a connection to port 22). Maybe it crashed or something like that. I did a kill -HUP and sshd is now working again.
Well today the luck was on my side because I could solve the problem with Webmin but for the future I want to be sure that I have access via ssh all the time.

- dom

You shouldn't need to worry about it..But why shut down webmin? Just set a good password on it and limit access to a certain IP.

If you don't want to do that, and sshd crashes, just call your datacenter and they can easily restart the server for you or start up sshd again :)

Take a look at Daemontools.
http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

Daemontools monitors and automaticly restarts a service if
it goes down. I haven't used it for SSHd yet, but rumors
say it works great.

If you're worried about webmin security set it up with SSL...

SSHd, shouldn't stop responding like that. How are you running it? Daemon or through Inetd?

I haven't yet seen that ssh comes back up by itself after a
'killall -HUP sshd'. If SSH crashes because of a kill signal you
will probably be able to restart it with Webmin, but if it crashes
by some other reason, Webmin will most likely also be dead
since ssh usually is the last thing that goes down :(