Comment 3 for bug 624361

Hi Simon, thanks very much for filing this bug report and working with us to make Ubuntu better.

Because of the way upstart and sshd work together, its hard to detect failures. The reason try-restart worked was that it falls through in /usr/sbin/service, as its not one of the regular actions that upstart supports.

In looking at this, I think the appropriate fix is to add a pre-stop that runs

/usr/sbin/sshd -t

And will warn the user that the config file is broken, and possibly even abort the stop.

Setting status to Triaged as I think this fix can be worked on now.

Setting status to High, as it is a serious problem for server users if sshd is silently broken on a remote machine.