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How can I disable SSH login for a root user? (I am the account owner)

Posted on December 16, 2014

How can I disable SSH login for a root user? (I am the account owner)



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Allow only certain users to ssh

  • Edit this file: /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  • At the bottom write: AllowUsers <your name>@<your ip address> ie. AllowUsers henry@173.58.33.1

You can disable root SSH login by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config, setting PermitRootLogin to no, and then restarting ssh:

sudo service ssh restart

Hello there,

By default on new Ubuntu servers, the PermitRootLogin is set to yes. So you can search only for PermitRootLogin in the sshd_config.

To disable root login you have to change this line:

PermitRootLogin yes

To:

PermitRootLogin no

However keep in mind that by default, on Ubuntu, password authentication is already set to no:

PasswordAuthentication no

Once you make a change to the sshd_conf file you need to also restart the SSH service:

systemctl restart sshd

Hope that this helps!

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