Created droplet and use SSH instead password, but if I log out from a root user then try log in again it asks me for a password.

January 19, 2015 3.7k views
HHH
By:
HHH

The problem is that I don't know the password and I have to close PuTTy and connect again to my server everytime.

2 comments
  • jonathan January 20, 2015

    The password is the password of the user you are trying to log into root as.

    In other words, if after logging out of "root", you become the user "hhh", then when you do

    sudo (something)

    and it asks for a password, it's asking for hhh's password.

  • HHH January 20, 2015

    thanks, now I understand

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2 Answers
kamaln7 MOD January 20, 2015

How are you logging out of PuTTy? You need to make sure to select your SSH key before connecting back.

I would recommend using an SSH Agent such as Pageant so you would no longer have to worry about selecting your SSH key:

How To Use Pageant to Streamline SSH Key Authentication with PuTTY
by Saleh Mohsen
Pageant is a PuTTY authentication agent. It holds your private keys in memory so that you can use them whenever you are connecting to a server. It eliminates the need to explicitly specify the relevant key to each Linux user account if you use more than one account to log into a server, as well as the need to type a key's passphrase each time you log into your user account
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  • HHH January 20, 2015

    by logging out I mean close PuTTy and run it again

  • kamaln7 MOD January 20, 2015

    Ok, so you need to select your SSH key in Connection -> SSH -> Auth every time you run PuTTy. However, if you're using Pageant, you don't need to do that.

  • HHH January 20, 2015

    No, I tell PuTTy where my keys are located and then save the session, so I don't need to add SSH key everytime when I run PuTTy

laurie February 27, 2015

I had the same problem, asking for a password for root. Here is what I did that helped.
Following this tutorial https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-14-04, I added my safe user. I went back into root and followed the same steps.

At the step "Add Public Key to New Remote User"
Where it say mkdir .ssh .. instead cd .ssh and ls to see the files that are there.
I continued the steps and when I got to nano .ssh/authorized_keys, I saw that my key was not pasted there.
After I added it, it seemed to work.. no more asking for a password.

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