Setting up a new user using SSH

Question

I followed the tutorial for setting up myself with SSH login which worked fine. I have another user I need to add as well but I am not sure how to go about doing that. I have his public key and added it to the droplet on creation. Droplet is running ubuntu 18.04. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’ve looked through several other tutorials and documentation for this as well but I just can’t seem to find exactly what I am looking for. I don’t think I can set him up the same way I set it up for myself.

KFSys · Accepted Answer

Hi @rconover , You’ll need to create a new user and add the SSH keys there. I normally set and create their home directory at the same time. i.e. Create Home Directory + .ssh Directory mkdir -p /home/mynewuser/.ssh Create Authorized Keys File touch /home/mynewuser/.ssh/authorized_keys Create User + Set Home Directory useradd -d /home/mynewuser mynewuser Add User to sudo Group usermod -aG sudo mynewuser Set Permissions chown -R mynewuser:mynewuser /home/mynewuser/ chown root:root /home/mynewuser chmod 700 /home/mynewuser/.ssh chmod 644 /home/mynewuser/.ssh/authorized_keys Set Password on User If you want to be able to log in as the user without an SSH key, setting a password will allow that, as long as PasswordAuthentication is enabled in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. passwd mynewuser … You can check the users home directory by running: echo $HOME … while logged in as the user. If you echo $PWD, it’ll give you the current path to the directory that you’re currently in. So if I ran cd /home, running: echo $PWD … will give me /home. If my home directory is /home/mynewuser, then $HOME will give me that directory :-). … Regards,KFSys

diegobechi · Answer

Hi there, I followed the steps listed above by KFSys and it looks like everything worked properly but when I tried to use the user&pass inside the Jetpack backup settings, it’s saying that the connection fails. Any thoughts? Besides that, I’m using Transmit (file transfer tool) and after the steps above I cannot connect to the server with the root user anymore :PANIC:

alexdo · Answer

Hi, @rconover You can check out our existing tutorial on how to add users on Ubuntu 18.04 here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-and-delete-users-on-ubuntu-18-04 Additionally you can check that the user’s ssh key is present in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file and if not to add it there. If the user needs a sudo access you can grant him access by following the tutorial. Hope that helps! Regards,Alex

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Setting up a new user using SSH

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