I needed to enable root ssh login on an Ubuntu (VM) server. Yes I know it’s a security risk, blah, blah, blah, this is a temporary setup so I can clone a VM. I googled around and everything said to simply set the root password and make sure to have “PermitRootLogin yes” in sshd_config. But try as I might, after making those changes and restarting ssh, I just could not log in. I tried rebooting the server and still no dice. Googling indicated others had been in this predicament, but no solution could be found….
Finally, I re-installed openssh-server with “apt-get install openssh-server” and then bingo it worked.
Posting this here so that next time it happens and I am saying to myself, “what the heck did i do last time this happened?”, I can find this and remember!
Edit: Upon further investigation, it seems that Ubuntu’s default ssh server configuration is in here:
/usr/etc/sshd_config
rather than the one found in /etc/sshd_config that we’re used to seeing.