For the curious...

Gontran tried to help me with some stuff at the Plug meeting tuesday and
we were stimied by what appeared to be a configuration problem.  It was
in fact not a configuration or authentication problem but a problem with
passwd...

It turns out that "useradd" does not specify a default shell in passwd. 
This causes inbound ssh's to fail.  It turns out that this is covered in
the Gentoo FAQ, however I was looking for configuration problems not
connect problems...  One I defined an appropriate shell... everything
came up as expected.

  EBo --