Home / server / Questions / 127544
Accepted
Miko
Asked: 2010-03-30 19:38:13 +0800 CST

Debian: Adding new user?

  • 772

How can I create a new user then SSH into the box under that user?

I ran:

useradd marco -d /home/marco -p WuUfhRdt4B

Then I added to /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

AllowUsers root marco

Then restarted ssh:

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

I can't login. What did I miss?

** Running Debian.

debian ssh

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The first thing I see is that you didn't specifically add a shell, you can ensure that the users shell is correct by running as root:

    chsh -s `which bash` marco

    The other thing to ensure is that the home directory was created by the useradd script.

    ls -al /home/marco/

    If it was not created you'll need to create it and change the ownership to the correct user:

    mkdir /home/marco
cp -a /etc/skel/.[a-z]* /home/marco
chown -R marco.marco /home/marco

    I would also make sure that your password was correctly placed in /etc/shadow as I never trust it from the command line:

    passwd marco

    And enter the password for marco (BTW, it's a really really bad idea to put a password anywhere but in a password field that is not shown. History files are extremely easy to read, as is serverfault :) Make sure you change marcos password is all I'm saying)

    If you still can't login check /var/log/auth, /var/log/messages, /var/log/secure etc for sshd entries, it should give you a pretty good idea as to what is failing.

    • 5

  2. In your example, is WuUfhRdt4B meant to be the user's password? That won't work because the argument to useradd -p is (according to the man page) "the encrypted password, as returned by crypt(3)." You probably want to use adduser anyway, since it's a lot more intuitive than useradd. Try this:

    adduser marco

    • 3