Windows Server 2019, SSH server, max number of connections or concurrent users?

hgelh-3450 21 Reputation points
2023-09-11T01:58:31.15+00:00

We are using Win2019, and enabled the built-in SSH server. We have different client devices (each with different IP addresses) connecting to this SSH server.

We would like to know, on the Win2019 SSH server, is there a limit on max. no. of connections or concurrent users? If yes, what's the default value and how to change it?

I found a sshd_config file under C:\ProgramData\ssh, and found 2 settings seem to be related to what I want, but not quite exactly what I want:

MaxSessions

MaxStartups

From a SSH manual page,

https://man.openbsd.org/sshd_config.5

#######################################################################

MaxSessions

Specifies the maximum number of open shell, login or subsystem (e.g. sftp) sessions permitted per network connection. Multiple sessions may be established by clients that support connection multiplexing. Setting MaxSessions to 1 will effectively disable session multiplexing, whereas setting it to 0 will prevent all shell, login and subsystem sessions while still permitting forwarding. The default is 10.

MaxStartups

Specifies the maximum number of concurrent unauthenticated connections to the SSH daemon. Additional connections will be dropped until authentication succeeds or the LoginGraceTime expires for a connection. The default is 10:30:100.

Alternatively, random early drop can be enabled by specifying the three colon separated values start:rate:full (e.g. "10:30:60"). sshd(8) will refuse connection attempts with a probability of rate/100 (30%) if there are currently start (10) unauthenticated connections. The probability increases linearly and all connection attempts are refused if the number of unauthenticated connections reaches full (60).

#######################################################################

For MaxSessions, honestly, I don't know what is meant by "multiple sessions permitted per network connection" or "multiplexing". Does it mean how many different shell, sftp client software, etc, you can open in the same client device?

For MaxStartups, my understanding is, max no. of connections which are connected, but not-yet login (staying at the password input stage?). This seem not what I want.

SSH_installed - Copy

sshd_ver - small

winver - small

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