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SFTP to Root fails

Posted on March 13, 2018

Miscellaneous

Ubuntu

By DaveJohnson

I’ve been trying to sftp to the root directory

droplet ip user: root pass: same pass I use on the droplet console

and I get this Error: Authentication failed. Error: Critical error: Could not connect to server

I’ve cleared my system, updated filezilla even rebooted my computer and it still does that.

What I need to do is get to my csr that i created so I can install an ssl

any help, I would be grateful for… thanks

dave

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Adrian St. Onge

March 18, 2018

Hi There,

It may be that you have SSH connections disabled for the ‘root’ user?

From the command line, check the following file:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

If you see the following line:

PermitRootLogin yes

Then root login as been disabled over SSH/SFTP.

If you are able to login to the root account over SSH, you may want to double check the password for case sensitive letters or extra spaces.

One way to test out what is going on is to create an ordinary user and SFTP your information to that account on your droplet.

Then, by command line, you can move that information from the newly created user account to the root account. I would recommend to disable root login at some point as this is best practise, and there are lots of SSH bots that will try to brute force login the root account.

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