Permission denied on ssh access with cygwin

Question

I have a fresh Windows 10 family (x64) install with an Administrator account Jean Perrin. I installed cygwin with openssh and modified C:\cygwin64\Cygwin.bat this way:

@echo off

C:
chdir C:\cygwin64\bin
set CYGWIN=binmode ntsec
bash --login -i

Then, I ran into ssh-host-config, answered yes to install sshd as a service, no to privilege separation and let the field empty for the value of CYGWIN for the daemon. I asked for a new privileged account ljp, and checked with netplwiz that this account has Administrator privilege on the host.

I created the /home/ljp directory manually with mkdir.

Then I started the sshd service with net start sshd and was able to login with the Jean Perrin account:

$ ssh Jean\ Perrin@localhost
Jean Perrin@localhost's password:
Last login: Fri Jan 29 11:03:50 2016 from ...

However, when I want to connect with the ljp account, I get a permission error:

$ ssh ljp@localhost
ljp@localhost's password:
Permission denied, please try again

I tried to follow the advice found here and did

mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd

but it didn't changed anything.

What am I doing wrong ? How can I connect via ssh with this account ?

Solution

The default username format is:

SERVERNAME+username@SERVERNAME

Or edit the /etc/passwd entry as shown above to make the format simpler.

Here is a site I found useful for configuring Cygwin SSH:

https://dbaportal.eu/2015/03/05/installing-openssh-cygwin-1-7-35-on-windows-2012-r2/

You can try connecting using the verbose option:

ssh -vvv SERVERNAME+username@SERVERNAME

Check that the \home folders exist and permissions are correct for the user.

Comments

[Jakuje]

check the logs from sshd. It should tell you why it failed.