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Permission denied (publickey)

Posted on January 2, 2020

Yesterday i was connected to my droplet via SSH as usual, doing my work. Then i has issues with zsh so i removed it to use the default console:

sudo apt-get --purge remove zsh

Then I exited and now I can’t connect anymore.

Via SSH I get the “permission denied” error. Via web console it looks like the login worked (I see the welcome screen for a second), and then it goes back to the login screen again.

Right now i have no way to log in. I tried re-adding the SSH key via dashboard and it says that the SSH key is already installed, so that’s not the problem (but i knew it).

I believe that after removing zsh now i don’t have a default shell.

What could I do??



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Hey @stesvis just so I understand more, you deleted zsh from your machine (client)

If you readd a key via the dashboard, it does not add it to the server. You can make a snapshot, then start a new server from that snapshot and select your key. Or you can use recovery boot to add your SSH key to the file system. I can go into more details if you wish.

However, I don’t think you would have deleted your local key? Whats inside your client machines ~/.ssh folder?

If you ssh with -vvv you will see more details with what its attempting to do with authentication.

Regards

Simon SnapShooter DigitalOcean Backups

@snapshooter yes please advise on how to recover.

In my client .ssh folder i have the id_rsa public and private keys. If I go to My Account, Security and click on Add SSH Key i can paste my public key from the local machine but then it says that the key is already registered on the authorized_keys file on the server.

And i am not surprised because i was connected 2 minutes before via SSH.

I had zsh installed on the server, but it had issues so i wanted to remove it and go back to the default bash.

I removed zsh from the server without setting the default bash first, and i believe this is the beginning of all my issues right now.

@snapshooter I ran ssh with the -vvv parameter and posted the response, but it was marked as spam.

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