Share

Question

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.

Accepted Answer

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)

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.

Reply