Amazon EC2 Root login

Question

I'm trying to enable root login for my EC2 instances. I know I could use su or sudo, but I need to be able to ssh'ing into my server as root because the Jenkins EC2-Plugin requires root access.

I already found some solutions during my web search but they all didn't work:

• PermitRootLogin in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
• Copy authorized_keys to root's .ssh-Folder

This link seemed to be quite useful but also didn't work: http://teknika.tumblr.com/post/5416465911/jenkins-ec2

Solution 1

Refer to the following to set root login:

sudo -s (to become root)
vi /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

Delete the lines at the begining of the file until you get to the words ssh-rsa.

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Set the variable PermitRootLogin to PermitRootLogin without-password (without quotes)

sudo /etc/init.d/sshd restart

Solution 2

Try this when you authenticate with your key:

$user@instance: sudo su

or assign a password with:

$user@instance: sudo su passwd

and change the password to enter with sudo su.

Solution 3

edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

• Comment out the line "PermitRootLogin"
• Comment out the line "PasswordAuthentication no"

Then restart the ssh service

/sbin/service sshd restart

Solution 4

You need to edit file : /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restart ssh service .

1. If you want to login using keys change as below :

   PermitRootLogin yes
   RSAAuthentication yes
   

2. If you want to login using password , change as below :

   PermitRootLogin yes
   PasswordAuthentication yes
   

Solution 5

1. ssh into EC2 as a normal user

2. sudo su
   

3. cd ~
   

4. Edit the authorized_keys

   vim .ssh/authorized_keys
   

5. remove the part which is not the key make sure the file will start with

   ssh-rsa ............................

6. Save the file and try to login as a root

   ssh root@servername
   

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