Can't get ssh working on Ubuntu

cohara

2/8/24, 1:26 PM

I am trying to follow this guide to get phpMyAdmin installed on Ubuntu 20.04.

The first step is to set up a non-root user, and it's here that I'm stuck. I cannot log in to root@public_server_ip. I am using:

curl http://ipinfo.io/ip

to get my IPv4 public IP.

Then I try (my_public_ip is my server's IP):

sudo ssh -vvv root@my_public_ip

This eventually times out with:

sudo ssh -vvv root@my_public_ip
OpenSSH_8.2p1 Ubuntu-4ubuntu0.5, OpenSSL 1.1.1f  31 Mar 2020
debug2: resolve_canonicalize: hostname my_public_ip is address
debug2: ssh_connect_direct
debug1: Connecting to my_public_ip [my_public_ip] port 22.
debug1: connect to address my_public_ip port 22: Connection timed out
ssh: connect to host my_public_ip port 22: Connection timed out

In trying to find out why this is happening I have tried:

netstat -plant | grep :22
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
 will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -                   
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      -                   
...

As far as I can see this looks OK. Also:

ps aux | grep sshd
root       11925  0.0  0.0  12188  6828 ?        Ss   12:09   0:00 sshd: /usr/sbin/sshd -D [listener] 0 of 10-100 startups
ciara      18194  0.0  0.0   9040   648 pts/0    S+   13:22   0:00 grep --color=auto sshd

The timeout also occurs with the regular user:

    ssh -vvv ciara@my_public_ip
OpenSSH_8.2p1 Ubuntu-4ubuntu0.5, OpenSSL 1.1.1f  31 Mar 2020
...
ssh: connect to host my_public_ip port 22: Connection timed out

I have tried disabling the firewall with:

sudo ufw --force disable

This makes no difference. I've also reset it and re-enabled it to no effect.

I'm not very experienced with this, but I can't find where the issue lies. Could anyone give me any pointers as to where I should look?

0 + 3

server

ssh

firewall

networking

phpmyadmin

steeldriver

2/8/24, 2:09 PM

Ubuntu systems are configured with "a non-root user with administrative privileges" by default and, for that reason, direct login by root is disabled by default as well - you should ssh as that regular user then use `sudo` to obtain root privileges

Bodo

2/8/24, 2:09 PM

Please [edit] your question and add more details. Is your public IP address IPv4 or IPv6? Please describe your network. On what system do you run the `ssh` command? What system do you want to reach? Why do you want to run `ssh` with `sudo`? Allowing `ssh` connections directly as remote user `root` might be a security risk. I don't see any reference of `ssh` in the linked guide.

cohara

2/10/24, 4:53 PM

Thanks @steeldriver I should have said that I tried the regular user too, but that also times out. I've edited the question to reflect that.

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