01-01-10 Configuring SSH on VMWare ESX Server For Root access

If you’d like to be able to access remotely VMWare ESX Server using root account which is not recommended practice you should edit sshd_config file located in /etc/ssh/ directory. This is due to the fact that by default, the Service Console no longer allows the root account to log in using an SSH client.

To do that we need to use a directly-attached keyboard and monitor type in at the Console:

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config,

and we’re going to want to scroll down, we can use the down arrow or the Page Down button, I’m just going to hit the Page Down button and notice here it says “Permit root login” and it says “No”, we’re going to want to change this to “Yes”. And again this does open up a security hole, so please do not use in production environments.

PermitRootLogin no should be change to PermitRootLogin yes

Restart the SSH service with the following command service sshd restart

Now remember once you’re done with SSH and copying your files over you’ll want to probably disallow that root user SSH permission and you just go back just the way we permitted it, you just put No in there and restart your SSHD and then the root user won’t be able to SSH into it.

Most likely you’ll want to set up a new user and allow that user SSH permission and you don’t want that user to be the root user because the root user can do anything on that server so you want to limit the permissions and then normally you run the SU command in order to execute commands that require higher privilege.