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SSH via port 443 not responding; others ports OK

Posted on August 28, 2015

Hello Digital Ocean comrades,

I greet you as a newbie and, of course, with a basic question relating to challenges I am having getting an SSH connection to connect to port 443 on my Ubuntu droplet.

Let me first set the basics.

Installed and created droplet; followed instructions in excellent tutorials located at https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/additional-recommended-steps-for-new-ubuntu-14-04-servers

have also reviewed and used portions of

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/ssh-essentials-working-with-ssh-servers-clients-and-keys

Server is up and running. I was able to custom configure to connect to a specific port (27182) for SSH.

Now, I wish to add Port 443 connection for SSH. I have edited sshd_config to add Port 443 as well as Port 22

ufw has SSH enabled and ports 27182/tcp, 443/tcp and 22/tcp cleared for traffic.

From sshd_config

What ports, IPs and protocols we listen for

Port 27182 Port 443 Port 22

Use these options to restrict which interfaces/protocols sshd will bind to

from ufw

xxxxxxxxxxxxx:~$ sudo ufw status Status: active

To Action From


27182/tcp ALLOW Anywhere 80/tcp ALLOW Anywhere 443/tcp ALLOW Anywhere 25/tcp ALLOW Anywhere 27182/tcp (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 80/tcp (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 443/tcp (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6) 25/tcp (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)

all edits to ssh_config were in nano and were saved. ssh was stopped then restarted

ufw has been reloaded.

I CAN telnet and puTTy connect to ports 27128 and to 22. I CANNOT get any sign of life from port 443… nothing… telnet never responds to it and puTTy spits a connection error when attempting 443 connection from a windoze box; terminal from my mac delivers same results. Can connect to 27182 and 22 from mac OK.

All my web research suggests I should be able to run an SSH connection though port 443… yet I cannot get it to work.

Any ideas on what I should do next to unplug port 443 connection? I am new with unix, so kindly be patient. No doubt this is going to be a very basic configuration error or misunderstanding on my part.

Thanks, michael



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Hello Mecarboy Have you got a webserver running, wich could use port 443 default? You can check your service running port with:

netstat -punta | grep 443

the -p flag will give you the process ID and the process name of whatever is using that port

the -u flag shows udp

the -n flag is for numerical addresses

the -t flag shows tcp

the -a shows listening and non-listening sockets

Just pick another port for SSH, it is conflicting with your web servers https port (default 443)

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