"There are days when I think the field of software engineering needs to make more use of capital punishment"

... I have spent almost 3 days looking for a problem in ssh to the NAS box that I use to store offsite file backups. Tonight I found the problem. In the screen shot below of the Settings window for the backups user, note the checkbox in the "Fingerprint" section, next to the "Settings" icon and "Delete" icon for that fingerprint.

Guess what: that checkbox belongs to the "RSYNC ONLY" words way above it, and if it is checked, then the NAS accepts only inbound rsync rather than full ssh. The mechanism by which it limits itself to rsync is itself insane, but I don't think it is quite a capital crime. Though its saying "Rejected" as the only error message instead of saying, maybe, what was rejected or why, makes me think about Singapore-style floggings.

My offsite backups are working again and I will definitely sleep better tonight. But I am still going to buy an ordinary computer instead of a NAS box to replace this with. General-purpose solutions are always better than special-purpose solutions. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10159477295605954&id=643265953