@lassee94933ef12b990f92bb30

Thanks!

Ok, so let’s start with not able to login with either user. If you can’t login to SSH, the only other way to login to your Droplet is using console, which you’d access by clicking on the name of the droplet and then clicking on ‘Access’ and then 'Launch Console’.

To login to console, you’ll need your root user password. If you never received a password and your Droplet is setup with SSH Keys only, there’s very little that can be done at this point, unfortunately, as you can’t use SSH Keys to login to the console.

If you can login to console, you can re-enable PasswordAuthentication by modifying:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

and changing:

PasswordAuthentication no

to

PasswordAuthentication yes

and then restarting SSHD:

service sshd restart

You could then reset passwords using passwd, such as:

passwd username

Getting you back in is what’s important right now. We can then work on setting up SSH Keys after though the best way to setup SSH Keys is actually to deploy them when you deploy your Droplet (as this makes it easier). You could then create a new user and we can walk through the setup,

If you can’t login to console, short of submitting a support ticket and seeing if they can help get you back in, you would effectively be locked out and would need to deploy a new Droplet.

When you start tinkering with SSH and a Firewall, you have to be very careful.

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh <user>@<hostname> 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys && echo "Key copied"'

That worked for me.

If you can able to log into the web console re-enable the following parameters by modifying /etc/ssh/sshd_config

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

PermitRootLogin yes
PasswordAuthentication yes
UseLogin yes

Then restart.

sudo systemctl reload sshd

 sudo service ssh restart

Hope it will help you :)

@lassee94933ef12b990f92bb30

Which guide(s) did you follow? Let’s start there so we’re on the same page and we can work from there :-).

Local. You need to replace user with root and host with your server’s IP.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-connect-to-your-droplet-with-ssh

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-ssh-keys–2

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-ssh-key-based-authentication-on-a-freebsd-server

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-ssh-keys-with-digitalocean-droplets

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-ssh-to-connect-to-a-remote-server-in-ubuntu

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-ssh-key-based-authentication-on-a-linux-server

And several more that werent on DO :/

I’m a noob so I’m groping in the dark lol

@jtittle
Thank you so far so good,
I have access to COnsole and root as well. I followed the steps you have outlined. Tried for kicks to ssh from local machine.. Still permission denied :/

We had the same problem as we no longer use our developer but he had set up ssh keys to log in. I could only get in via the console on the DigitalOcean portal. I had to reset the Authentication which you can see in the 2 lines adde below. I followed anushanth thread above but with the following modifications:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

PermitRootLogin yes
PasswordAuthentication yes (This didn’t exist in my file)
UseLogin yes (This didn’t exist in my file)
RSAAuthentication no
PubkeyAuthentication no

sudo systemctl reload sshd (This didn't work)

sudo service ssh restart

This worked like a charm, went back to my 3rd party console (iTerm2) and was able to log in with my password.