The host key for this server was not found, but another type of key exists.

About

The complete error message is:

The host key for this server was not found, but another type of key exists.

An attacker might change the default server key to confuse your client into thinking the key does not exist.

Please contact your system administrator.

This error occurs when connecting to a remote server via ssh or sftp. Applications which use ssh or the ssh kioslave, such as Kate or Dolphin, may also display it.

Solutions

We don't know exactly what causes this problem, nor have we found any solution that works all the time, but the odds are good that one of the following will:

• Remove references to the given hostname (where you're trying to do "ssh <user>@<host>" or "sftp://<user>@<host>") from your local ~/.ssh/known_hosts
  • The quick way to do this is ssh-keygen -R <hostname>
  • Example of this not working: 2015-04-30 (using KNetAttach)
• Use fish:// instead of sftp://.
  • Example of this not working: 2011-02-12 (KDE 4.6.0 / openSUSE 11.3)