SSH seems to be waiting for NetworkManager to start: # rc-service sshd start * WARNING: sshd is scheduled to start when NetworkManager has started This prevents user from starting such a critical service as SSH is unless also starting NetworkManager. This doesn't make any sense, as: 1) When NetworkManager is *not* running, the network connectivity can be acquired by other means, e.g. running dhclient by hand or using *ip* to configure networking. 2) When NetworkManager *is* running, that doesn't necessarily mean we have a global connectivity. Note that SSH can listen on wildcard addresses and therefore has no ordering problems with the network setup. Global connectivity is only a runtime dependency for SSH to be reachable via global address, not for SSH itself. SSH can also be used through link-local or even node-local address (aka localhost). OpenSSH 6.1_p1 NetworkManager 0.9.6.4
After uninstalling networkmanager, it works. But this is not really what one would want.
For some reason, sshd won't start anyway and it looks like this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/sshd-fatal-daemon-failed-no-such-device-279664/ This helped: rm /dev/null mknod /dev/null c 1 3 But I'm curious who and why in the hell would remove /dev/null and make it an ordinary file?
Just one remark to the previous comment, the /dev/null ordinary file was there when udev is not running because of lack of CONFIG_DEVTMPFS.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 266386 ***