Putty error : Unable to open connection to hostname : Host does not exist

POOJA GUPTA picture POOJA GUPTA · May 30, 2015 · Viewed 63.2k times · Source

I am using Putty to ssh into some of the servers that I work on. I am able to connect all others except the one. Although I was able to connect to it before. Whenever I try connecting to it, it always give me error:

Unable to open connection on myhost: Host does not exist

My firewall is off and I have even re-installed putty but that did not fix it. When I tried connecting to the same server using putty on some other windows system, I was able to do so. I searched regarding this on Internet but did not find much relevant.

I am running putty on Windows 7.

What can be the possible issue?

Answer

Marged picture Marged · May 30, 2015

As I understand you have three computers involved. At the same time one connection is working and the other one fails. So we can exclude that the ssh daemon on your linux box is hanging. In lack of knowing their real names I will call your computers linuxbox (this is the computer you want to ssh into), win7ok (that is the computer that you are able to ssh from using putty) and win7fail (that obviously is the computer you can't connect from).

Please do a tracert from both Win7 computers:

tracert linuxbox.your.domain
tracert linuxbox

Add the results to your question as it will help us find out what is happening.

Perhaps it is also a good idea to determine the ip address of the linuxbox from win7ok:

ping linuxbox

or

nslookup linuxbox

Then try to connect from win7fail by using the ip address of the target computer, perhaps it is only a DNS problem (which might be as nmap is failing too).

To make all of this easier to understand for us please provide the real names of the computers as you use them in putty.