Question

Permission denied (publickey) for root login

Posted February 20, 2018 16.8k views
DigitalOceanApplications

It was working before but now somehow its not working.

ssh root@111.11.11.111 gives below error message
Permission denied (publickey).

While for other user its working ( i.e ssh myUser@111.11.11.111 )

I had tried many tutorials on digital oceans and from stackoverflow, but none working and I can’t login with root.

Anybody has resolution?
Thanks.

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kirandev
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kirandev
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3 answers
Woet February 20, 2018

Add your public key to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

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jasonjpeters February 21, 2018

This happens if you have multiple SSH keys loaded into your agent.

Lets say your key file is idrsa and idrsa.pub respectivly

ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa root@111.11.11.111

If you don’t want to type the -i aspect each time create a file in your .ssh folder named config and add an entry like below

Host whatever_name
    HostName 111.11.11.111 or domain.com
    User root
    PreferredAuthentications publickey
    IdentityFile /path/to/.ssh/key_file
    UseKeychain yes
    AddKeysToAgent yes

update the entry to match your setup.

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mikeea3bc0920b989692358415 July 18, 2018

You get that error message when :
PasswordAuthentication no in /etc/sshd_config.

I changed it to “yes”, ran ‘service ssh restart’ and all was well.
Changed it back to “no” and again ran 'service ssh restart’.
ssh to DO machine now works as intended.

NB:I don’t allow password logins.

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