SSH publickey permission denied

[cah]

I set up 4 RHEL 6.6 servers a few weeks ago. All SSH connections were working fine until this Monday (04/11/2016). All of a sudden, 3 out of 4 servers are giving the following errors:

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Apr 13 15:52:20 laxldb107 sshd[45521]: Set /proc/self/oom_score_adj to 0
Apr 13 15:52:20 laxldb107 sshd[45521]: Connection from 10.125.81.24 port 56826
Apr 13 15:52:23 laxldb107 sshd[45521]: Found matching RSA key: d0:fb:ef:4f:39:37:fe:c6:6f:36:d7:78:43:52:1f:14
Apr 13 15:52:23 laxldb107 sshd[45522]: Postponed publickey for hsiaoc1 from 10.125.81.24 port 56826 ssh2
Apr 13 15:52:23 laxldb107 sshd[45521]: Found matching RSA key: d0:fb:ef:4f:39:37:fe:c6:6f:36:d7:78:43:52:1f:14
Apr 13 15:52:23 laxldb107 sshd[45521]: Failed publickey for hsiaoc1 from 10.125.81.24 port 56826 ssh2
Apr 13 15:52:23 laxldb107 sshd[45522]: fatal: Access denied for user hsiaoc1 by PAM account configuration

After checking all configuration files, they are all identical.
I even opened up a case with Red Hat but they couldn't help as expected.

The issue happened with publickey connection only. Console log in and password ssh connection were still working.

Out of blue, I checked on Quest VAS configuration and found the working server has a different users.allow file. That means the VASD might have been restarted. So, I tried to restart vasd on all 3 failing servers. Guess what? They all started to work with publickey ssh connection afterwards.

No idea why VAS would interfere with SSH connection but that was the fix. A restart of vasd.

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service vasd restart