Failed to add the host to the list of know hosts

Question

Mac OSX Lion 10.7.

In an effort to get around weird environment stuff (homebrew wasn't installing wget, and I had all sorts of weird blocks and errors), I uninstalled zschrc and homebrew and a bunch of other stuff, then installed fish shell.

Now, whenever I try to push/pull to/from github, I get this error:

The authenticity of host 'github.com (204.232.175.90)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is <string of colon-separated chars that I should probs keep private>.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (/Users/sasha/.ssh/known_hosts).

So I tried to check the permissions of my ~./ssh folder, and got this, which looks fine to me:

-rw-r--r--  1 sasha  staff    97B Jul  9 22:56 config
-rw-------  1 sasha  staff   1.7K May 16  2012 id_rsa
-rw-r--r--  1 sasha  staff   403B May 16  2012 id_rsa.pub
drwx------  5 sasha  staff   170B Jul 15 09:56 known_hosts

All that's in known_hosts is a pem file I used for ssh'ing (also with the "authenticity..." prompt) to an Amazon ec2 instance, though I tried copying id_rsa and id_rsa.pub there when things got desperate.

Any idea what's going on? I'd love to fix this so I don't get prompted all the many times I push/pull.

EDIT I followed these instructions successfully a while ago, so I do have my ssh keys on Github, and they're recognized, so that when I run ssh -T [email protected], I get

Hi sashafklein! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

It seems to be exclusively my local computer that's unhappy with my ssh situation.

Answer 1

In your specific case, your known_hosts is a folder, so you need to remove it first.

For other people which experiencing similar issue, please check the right permission to your ~/ssh/known_hosts as it may be owned by different user (e.g. root). So you may try to run:

sudo chown -v $USER ~/.ssh/known_hosts

to fix it.