How To Log Into Your Droplet with PuTTY (for windows users)

August 25, 2014 4.2k views
johnjenkinson1
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johnjenkinson1

I’ve created a droplet and installed PuTTY to connect to the droplet. When following the tutorial, after connecting to the droplet through PuTTY, using root and pw, I am forced to change my password. As soon as I enter the new password and press “Enter,” the PuTTY window closes. When I reopen, and reconnect, my new password does not work. The old password stills works, but when I reconnect, again the process of creating a new password and closing afterwards repeats. Please advise.

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3 Answers
asb MOD August 25, 2014

When you first login, note that the first prompt is asking for the current password, not the new one. It is the one that is emailed to you. If that is entered incorrectly, you will be logged out and the password will not have changed. The flow looks like:

You are required to change your password immediately (root enforced)
Changing password for root.
(current) UNIX password: 
Enter new UNIX password: 
Retype new UNIX password:

If you’re still having issues, you can reset the password in the DigitalOcean control panel:

Of course, if you use SSH keys you won’t need to worry about the password at all. Check out:

How To Use SSH Keys with PuTTY on DigitalOcean Droplets (Windows users)

How To Use SSH Keys with PuTTY on DigitalOcean Droplets (Windows users)
by Justin Ellingwood
PuTTY is a Windows program used to establish SSH sessions with Linux servers. In this guide, we'll demonstrate how to use PuTTY to create SSH key pairs to use within the DigitalOcean interface. You can then easily create servers that you can log into without a password.
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hunky August 25, 2014

I have too faced this problem once.. Fortunately I was in initial trial and error stage.. not live, all I did is wipe it and rebuild the image :)

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djos December 12, 2017

Hi, I just created a video to show how to do one click connection with root and sample user with putty on Windows :

Here is the video (20min) :
https://youtu.be/Iq3rr5yCAmk

Have a great success with your droplet !

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