Yesterday a run an update of my colo box and updated openssh from net-misc/openssh-4.3_p2-r5 to net-misc/openssh-4.4_p1-r6. I received the PORTAGE_ELOG email telling me that openssh needs to be restarted for the changes to take effect. But as I was trying to log on my machine I received ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host What would be the recommended way of updateing openssh? Seperate this update from all other updates and run emerge -u net-misc/openssh && /etc/init.d/sshd restart It can always happen that the current ssh connection goes down while running emerge so even if in most cases you're still logged on to restart manually you'll never be safe ... You can extend that issue to libraries linked into openssh, such as openssl which caused a similar openssh error some weeks ago when I updated it to dev-libs/openssl-0.9.8d. PLEASE, at least write some warning into the Changelog files or find another solution for the future. Maybe activate the static useflag per default just to make sure that openssh will never break ...
See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0042.html This can't be solved by ebuild in any way.