OpenSSH runs as two processes when connecting to other computers. The first process is a privileged process and controls the issuance of privileges as necessary. The second process communicates with the network. Additional installation steps are necessary to set up the proper environment which are performed by the following commands: mkdir /var/empty && chown root:sys /var/empty && groupadd sshd && useradd -c 'sshd privsep' -d /var/empty -g sshd -s /bin/false sshd OpenSSH is very sensitive to changes in the linked OpenSSL libraries. If you recompile OpenSSL, OpenSSH may fail to startup. An alternative is to link against static OpenSSL library. To link against the static library, execute the following command: sed -i "s:-lcrypto:/usr/lib/libcrypto.a:g" configure Install OpenSSH by running the following commands: ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc/ssh \ --libexecdir=/usr/sbin --with-md5-passwords && make && make install