Create a Local Administrative Account for Secure Shell

You must create local administrative accounts that can be used as Secure Shell (SSH) and that are members of the secondary

wheel

group, or both before you remove the root SSH access.

Before you deactivate direct root access, test that authorized administrators can access SSH by using

AllowGroups

, and that they can use the wheel group and the

command to log in as root.

# useradd username -d /home/vropsuser -g users -G wheel -m 
# passwd username

Wheel is the group specified in

AllowGroups

for SSH access. To add multiple secondary groups, use

-G wheel,sshd

Switch to the user and provide a new password to ensure password complexity checking.

# su – username
username@hostname:~>passwd

If the password complexity is met, the password updates. If the password complexity is not met, the password reverts to the original password, and you must rerun the password command.

After you create the login accounts to allow SSH remote access and use the

command to log in as root using the wheel access, you can remove the root account from the SSH direct login.

To remove direct login to SSH, modify the

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

file by replacing

(#)PermitRootLogin yes

with

PermitRootLogin no

Managing Secure Shell, Administrative Accounts, and Console Access

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Create a Local Administrative Account for Secure Shell