Report this

What is the reason for this report?

Dashboard console access with SSH keys?

Posted on April 23, 2014
tph

By tph

I set up a droplet with an SSH key for remote access. How can I use the “console access” area of my dashboard for the droplet? It wants a password, but no password is available when using SSH keys.



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Use the command “passwd” to change the password, no previous password is required, or do a Root Password Reset for your droplet.

In case anyone else has this problem also (the reason I would need to access via web console is because i obviously am not at my terminal at home)… So, you can view the droplet and reset password from there. You will get an email with the new password, and then you can log in, and set your own root password.

The remote console does not use OpenSSH to log in to your droplet so you will not be able to use SSH keys to do that. <br>What you can do is reset the password for the root account (run the command <code>passwd</code> as root), disable password log in for the root user by setting <code>PermitRootLogin</code> to <code>without-password</code> which should still allow you to use your SSH keys to log in to your droplet but not the password (again, this only applied to the SSH server), and use the new password to log in via the Remote Console. <br>Hope that helps!

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.