By Mehdiway
I found a bug when I followed the first steps to creating a securing the server.
The problem :
You don’t know the password for root when creating a droplet with an ssh key
Reproduce the problem :
- Create a droplet with an ssh key
- Connect to server with ssh key
- Create a new user and add ssh connection
- Disable ssh for root (security measure)
- Try to do
sudowith the new user
You’re asked to enter a password for root but DigitalOcean didn’t send the password by email because I created the droplet with an ssh key.
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Hey there,
That’s not really a bug: it works this way across pretty much every Linux distribution. “sudo” asks for the current user’s password (if a password at all), not the root password. “su” is what asks for the root password.
Generally, what we recommend is setting a password for the new user when you create the root user, but keeping passwords disabled over SSH. This way, you have a password you can use when sudo-ing and logging in through our VNC Console, but SSH remains secure. That’s how I set up most of my droplets, and it works quite nicely.
I hope that helps! :)
Best, Eris Platform Support Specialist
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