--- title: Unable to get SSH host key due to short timeout date: 2025-02-08 --- Some servers can be a bit slow in responding to host key request, so `ssh-keyscan` may return empty result when using the default 5 seconds timeout. A workaround is to [increase the timeout](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/443251), `ssh-keyscan -T 10 hostname` for 10 seconds. Noticed this issue from host key verification error when mirroring a GitLab repository to an external repository. I could not fix it because I can't modify the SSH client configuration in GitLab.com to increase `ConnectTimeout`.