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I was able to SSH into my VPS earlier today, and made no major changes. However now when I attempt to SSH into my VPS it doesn't even ask me for my password it just times out.

If I open the serial console and attempt to SSH via localhost it works fine. I have also pinged my hostname and ip address and both of these show the server is up.

Does anyone know what could be causing this?

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11
  • Is your sshd running?
    – Bart De Vos
    May 9, 2012 at 18:15
  • Sounds like either a FW issue or the SSH/OpenSSH service is down, is the process running?
    – Chopper3
    May 9, 2012 at 18:15
  • @BartDeVos ps -A | grep ssh returns 3748 ? 00:00:00 sshd 17478 pts/0 00:00:00 ssh 17479 ? 00:00:00 sshd 17481 ? 00:00:00 sshd Honestly I have no idea what this means (am a newbie)
    – George Reith
    May 9, 2012 at 18:16
  • @BartDeVos I also restarted sshd to be safe still nothing
    – George Reith
    May 9, 2012 at 18:21
  • @Chopper3 What is FW?
    – George Reith
    May 9, 2012 at 18:21

1 Answer 1

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4

Things to check:

  1. Check your route; on your client run traceroute <ip>
  2. Check your name resolution; on your client and server run dig <hostname>
  3. Check your firewall; on your server run iptables --list (test ssh with your client firewall disabled as well)
  4. Restart the service; /etc/init.d/sshd restart (or whatever is appropriate for your distro)

Beyond those issues there could be a few more, including errors or outages at the VPS provider.

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10
  • Ok all of those are checking out ok (still no SSH) apart from I am unable to run iptables --list it doesn't understand that command.
    – George Reith
    May 9, 2012 at 19:10
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    run which iptables, you might need to run sudo iptables --list
    – Joseph Kern
    May 9, 2012 at 19:15
  • which iptables returns /usr/bin/which: no iptables in (/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin) and sudo iptables ---list returns sudo: iptables: command not found
    – George Reith
    May 9, 2012 at 19:21
  • Did you turn off your client-side firewall? (strange that you don't have iptables installed, which distro is this?)
    – Joseph Kern
    May 9, 2012 at 19:26
  • CentOS 5.5 32bit, I installed centmin mod
    – George Reith
    May 9, 2012 at 19:30

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