Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
The client reports the sha1 hash of the server's key as a sequence of 16 pairs of hex digits, like this: a7:b1:3e:3d:84:24:a2:5a:91:5f:6f:e9:cf:dd:2b:6a This is MD5 hash. As you can see running ssh-keygen -l -E md5 -f ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub will get you the same fingerprint you need without such harakiri you are explaining in your answer.
Full answer by Jakuje: https://superuser.stackexchange.com/a/1088260 (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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