Hey. It would be nice if in addition to Include (which seems to ignore any non-existant/wrongly-typed/unreadable files), one had a IncludeMandatory (or so) option, that lets ssh respectively sshd fail, if the file doesn't exist, cannot be read, has the wrong type, etc.. If a wildcard-pattern would be used in that directive, then at least one file would need to match it in order not to fail. This is e.g. similar to Apache httpd's Include and IncludeOptional options. The motivation for this would be that one can more easily make configurations, in which one has a base-config (e.g. ssh[d]_config) which is the same for all servers, and then something like: users-groups-authz.conf, which contains AllowUsers and friends. Or maybe an extra file, which just sets the authn methods allowed for that particular host (typically on the sshd side then). I that config snippet would be missing, one often wants things to rather fail, than to fall back to defaults (like AllowUsers *). Thanks, Chris.