I found an article and applied the following steps to secure my dedicated server. Now I can not access directly the root but through a <username>

Now I want to access the root directly. what should I do?

thanks & best regards

add a user with the id <username> to the wheel group:
usermod -G wheel <username>
Edit the PAM configuration file for su, /etc/pam.d/su, in a text editor and remove the comment (#) from the line shown below:
# auth required /lib/security/pam_wheel.so use_uid
So that is looks like this: auth required /lib/security/pam_wheel.so use_uid
Edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file with a text editor and find the following line:
#PermitRootLogin yes
Change the yes to no and remove the '#' at the beginning of the line so that it reads:
PermitRootLogin no
• Restart the sshd service:
# service sshd restart

If you are concerned about security, why should you login as root? You explicitly told ssh to not permit root login. If you don't want this feature enabled, you have to do a step back and reset this flag to "yes". Anyway, I suggest to keep it as you've already set, since root is the only and unique known user to all Unix systems (the first to hit by huge SSH attacks).

Thanks for your suggestion

If you want to secure ssh, there are several things you can do.

• Use "AllowUsers" or "AllowGroups" to control who can log in.
• Use Key exchange only for authentication.
• Use strong pass phrases when creating the keys.
• Disable Root logins.
• Disallow ssh version 1

Can you please let me know any docs as I don't know to create the groups, then user and to set permissions for these users

thanks & best regard