I’ve been building / porting various projects to maven lately, and pushing them to our in-house maven server. For a while, I was doing this from my laptop at home. However, at work, I’m pushing to localhost (it’s a temporary thing while we determine if maven will actually work long-term.)

The following error had me stumped for a few days: [cc lang=”bash”] [INFO] Error retrieving previous build number for artifact ‘de.balokb:libreadline-java-i386-Linux-c23cxx6:jar’: repository metadata for: ‘snapshot de.balokb:libreadline-java-i386-Linux-c23cxx6:1.0-SNAPSHOT’ could not be retrieved from repository: inhouse_snapshot due to an error: Exit code: 1 - Host key verification failed. [/cc]

All the googling I did turned up people stumped with ssh public key problems, or users who had specified ssh: instead of extssh: … etc. It was fairly quick to elleminate those issues, or so I thought. (ssh localhost right? No problem.)

I happened to look in more detail at my pom.xml: [cc lang=”xml”]

<repository>
  <id>inhouse</id>
  <name>Inhouse Internal Release Repository</name>
  <url>scpexe://10.0.0.26/var/www/maven/inhouse</url>
</repository>

[/cc]

hm… 10.0.0.26 I wonder…

[cc] $ ssh 10.0.0.26 The authenticity of host ‘10.0.0.26 (10.0.0.26)’ can’t be established. RSA key fingerprint is a7:bf:36:4c:b9:c7:c2:f9:03:9a:3a:a7:4f:10:e5:ba. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? [/cc]

Ah ha! I clearly can’t use a pom.xml that lists “localhost” in the server section – I’d only be able to push from one place. However, since I’d never ssh’d to 10.0.0.26 from localhost, the fingerprint was unknown, and that was causing maven to error out with the problem I saw initially.

“Fingerprint ID failed” would have been a nicer error message, but I don’tk now that that is possible.