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can't log in via ssh all of a sudden (was working before)

Posted on January 7, 2018

I set up an SSH key for my droplet 9 months ago when I started it, and have been logging in to my server from terminal using the root user with no problem. But today it suddenly stopped working. When I typed in the command:

ssh root@[ip.address]

It says “Permission denied (publickey)”.

I don’t know what went wrong. I don’t remember changing anything. But it just suddenly stopped working. Any ideas what the problem could be?



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I recently experienced the same (and fixed it). Reason: human error :)

I was fiddling with docker, and accidentally changed the ownership of my .ssh folder to docker:docker (I thought i was smart by symbolically linking /root/.ssh to /home/docker/.ssh)

Anyways, after setting the appropriate permissions/ownership of the .ssh-folder everything worked again. Hope this helps.

Have you recently deleted any files off your computer, you may have accidentally deleted your key. You can always just create a new one though if you SSH into your server using the password that you originally got then it should be all good

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