ssh problem

Hi all! I'm desperately hoping that you can help me out. I'm a Mac newbie, recently converted from Windows, and loving it. I have a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.4.11. I'm supposed to be working on my PhD at the moment, but haven't been able to login to my linux box in England for 4 days now! Argh!

I'm running ssh in an xterm window. The command is:
ssh -Y <myname>@<servername>

This has always worked before. It worked at my house last Thursday. On Friday I went to my mother's house for the weekend. It worked there. When I returned home on Sunday, it had stopped working. The error message is: ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

I've contacted the network admin in England. He says it must be on my end. I deleted my .ssh directory. I removed all my caches. I called my isp and asked if they'd changed any firewall settings. I read all kinds of things online about ssh. I made a new test account and tried to connect from there. No dice.

When I run ssh -v -v -v I get:

ssh -v -v -v -Y <myname>@<servername>
OpenSSH_5.1p1, OpenSSL 0.9.7l 28 Sep 2006
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config
debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0
debug1: Connecting to <servername> [server] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
debug1: identity file /Users/<myname>/.ssh/identity type -1
debug1: identity file /Users/<myname>/.ssh/id_rsa type -1
debug1: identity file /Users/<myname>/.ssh/id_dsa type -1
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!!

Looks like something is wrong on the server side. Have a look at this (they have the same problem):
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host - LinuxQuestions.org

Try connecting from a different machine and if it does not work I'd suggest ask the admin to check on the /var/ directory on the server as pointed out in the above post.