Why am I unable to SSH to my instance without using the dashboard link?

Background

With our v5.8 Rightimage comes a change to Managed SSH logins. When attempting to login to a v5.8 (or newer) instance, you can no longer use your own private key and login as the 'root' user. This article aims to explain this and what can be done to login manually to a Linux instance.

Answer

With v5.8 and newer Rightimages, we've disallowed logging in as the root user via SSH when using a user's individual private/public keypair. Rightlink will still insert the public key of any user who has the 'server_login' permission on an account into the authorized_keys file of all instances, however you will not be able to login as the root user unless you are using the actual server's keypair that it was launched with.

Instead, the optimal method of manually logging in is to use the 'rightscale' user instead. When attempting to login to an instance via SSH, you will want to utilize this user, and it should automatically log you in and create your own user profile on the instance with a firstname_lastname designation.

For example, to manually SSH, type something like:

ssh -i /path/to/users/private/key rightscale@1.2.3.4

This should work for logging into newer image based instances, and it will log you in as a firstname_lastname user. Once logged in, you should also be given the ability to use sudo and switch to the root user if needed.

As mentioned above, this does *not* affect users who are trying to SSH in from the dashboard or who are using the private launch key of the server itself, rather it only affects people who are trying to login as root using their own private/public keypair or the managed user keypair provided by Rightscale.

Still have questions?

Feel free to call us at (866) 787-2253 or open up a support ticket by navigating to the Support -> Email option from the top right of the dashboard.