Permission denied (publickey) for root login

Posted on February 20, 2018

DigitalOcean

Applications

By kirandev

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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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.

Jason Peters

February 21, 2018

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

Lets say your key file is id_rsa and id_rsa.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.