Linux – SSHing with the nobody user

Please don't delete the entire known_hosts file as recommended by some people, this totally voids the point of the warning. It's a security feature to warn you that a man in the middle attack may have happened.

I suggest you identify why it thinks something has changed, most likely an SSH upgrade altered the encryption keys due to a possible security hole. You can then purge that specific line from your known_hosts file:

sed -i 377d ~/.ssh/known_hosts

This deletes line 377 as shown after the colon in the warning:

/home/emerson/.ssh/known_hosts:377

Alternatively you can remove the relevant key by doing the following

ssh-keygen -R 127.0.0.1 (obviously replace with the server's IP)

Please DO NOT purge the entire file and ensure this is actually the machine you want to be connecting to prior to purging the specific key.

You don't want to do (1) -- Leave root's home directory alone. (2) is your best option - Create a new directory owned by the user the daemon will run as & have it do any disk I/O it needs to do in that directory.

Semi-related, please don't run things as "nobody" -- there's an old joke that nobody is usually the most privileged user on a *NIX system because all the daemons run as "nobody".

If you're really concerned about security you don't want to fall into that trap. It's worth taking the extra minute to create a dedicated user for your daemons with appropriate restrictions :-)