ssh login to non root users

On Ubuntu Guests root access is configured via sudoers. This should not be changed because of security reasons.

Webmin and ssh outside of Cloudmin work as expected. In Cloudmin no ssh login is possible: Message: ssh login failed, user does not have root access.

Just to use the features ssh and login, it would be great to allow ssh login without root privilege.

At the moment webmin acces is granted at webmin -> webmin-servers, but not in the cloudmin module.

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Comments

Unfortunately Cloudmin needs direct root SSH access in order to transfer files via scp, which doesn't support sudo. The simplest fix is to edit /root/.ssh/authorized keys on the Ubuntu system and remove the shell command that causes the login to fail as root.

I don't see any security advantage to not allowing direct root SSH access, as most Ubuntu systems allow sudo to root from the default ubuntu user without any password. So anyone who can login as ubuntu gets immediate root access anyway..

And to add to Jamie's comment -- you can setup SSH to not allow root to login with a password, but only with a SSH key. That would add an additional layer of security, and would prevent remote users from being able to guess root's password.

To do that, you can edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and set "PermitRootLogin" to "without-password".