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Hi I'm attempting to change a user's password. So I connect as root and just

    passwd Joe

Here I've got a little prompt, I enter a new password, twice and I get this :

    Password changed

So far so good. However if I try to login as Joe@webserver or to ssh joe@webserver ls (for example). It asks for my password, which I enter. I get the prompt three times and

    permission denied(publickey, keyboard-interactive)

Is it possible that the person that originally created that user put some weird restrictions on it? I checked the shadow and passwd files (without changing anything ofc) and everything looks fine.

Sorry if my question is not relevant or if I haven't browsed enough but I've been searching since yesterday why or how this could happen and really can't wrap my mind around it.

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  • You better use authentication without password, but key Mar 26, 2013 at 9:19
  • @Roman sorry I'm not used to working with server related operations how do I do that, a link to a man page or anything would be appreciated if it's not too much to ask.
    – Kestion
    Mar 26, 2013 at 9:48
  • @Xaerxess but how can I achieve that since at one point I'm being asked joe's password and I don't have it and am unable to change it
    – Kestion
    Mar 26, 2013 at 10:18

2 Answers 2

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Thanks to Chewi and Xaerxess I used authentication keys which was way more logical, however my home dir was encrypted so I was unable to copy my key to the server. This helped https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH/OpenSSH/Keys.

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It looks like password authentication has been disabled because it is not one of the mentioned methods. As commented above, you're better off using public key authentication anyway. Read up on it somewhere and put your public key into ~joe/.ssh/authorized_keys. Don't forget to set the owner to joe otherwise it won't work.

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  • yes but I can't go passed this step since it's asking for the jo's password which I don't have and can't change it. sudo cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh jo@webserver "cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2" if I try using a newuser I get a permission denied anyways.
    – Kestion
    Mar 26, 2013 at 10:08

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