Question
I cannot login to my user directly from SSH, `Permission denied (publickey).`.
- Posted on May 14, 2017
- Linux BasicsUbuntu 16.04
Asked by notalentgeek
Hello I have been using DigitalOcean for couple of months for my Python Flask project. I usually starts my Droplet creation with these commands.
# In my local computer.
ssh root@123.123.123.123
# In droplet.
adduser user_test
usermod -aG sudo user_test
su - user_test
# Logged in into user user_test.
I used DigitalOcean since last year November and then stopped using DigitalOcean for the last two months. I am pretty sure after the commands above I can directly connect into user user_test with this command.
ssh user_test@123.123.123.123
However today login with such command now results in Permission denied (publickey).. If I want to login into user_test I need to login from root.
ssh root@123.123.123.123
su - user_test
Is there any steps I missed those make me unable login directly to user?
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@notalentgeek
The
Permission Denied (publickey)generally means that SSH Keys are enabled and when trying to login asuser_test, the only accepted method of authentication is an SSH Key, which isn’t provided via the command you’re executing to login.To pass an SSH Key during login, you need to pass the
-iargument followed by the path to the key (private key) that’s stored locally.As
root, I’d open up/etc/ssh/sshd_config, like so:And search for
PasswordAuthentication. If that’s set to no, password-based logins won’t work and only SSH Keys will be allowed to be used – which would be a little odd if you’re able to login asrootwithout a key, if this is set tono.When trying to login with
user_test, you can pass-v,-vv, or-vvvto get a more verbose output as to what’s going on to help identify the issue. You’d run that locally, for example, try:or
or
Hi @notalentgeek !
Check if you have permissions on
~/.ssh/authorized_keyswith user_test. You can check them with the command ls -al and appears like this:drwxr-xr-x 14 user_test staff 476 May 4 18:42 .atom-rw------- 1 user_test staff 13461 May 14 21:26 .bash_history-rw-r--r-- 1 user_test staff 18 May 4 17:13 .bash_profiledrwx------ 123 user_test staff 4182 May 14 21:46 .bash_sessionsIf you don’t have permission in the file you have to change file owner
chown user_test:user_test ~/.ssh/autorized_keysRegards,