Comment 13 for bug 1414466

I have had the same problem, I tried logging into a buildroot image that was started using the following command line:

    qemu-system-i386 -drive file=output/images/disk.img,format=raw,index=0,media=disk -vga std -nic user,ipv6=off,model=e1000,mac=10:10:10:10:10:10,hostfwd=tcp::4000-:22

The ssh connection was picked up, but nothing happened. The problem was that the network device was not brought up! I added the following to /etc/network/interfaces

    auto eth0
    iface eth0 inet dhcp

And voila, I can use

    ssh username@localhost -p 4000

to log into the machine using ssh.