SSH command, permission denied

Abstractt · 11-12-2007, 05:47 AM

Hi Everyone,

Friday we had a little problem at our server. I was forced to call in the help of Tech support, because our sysadmin is away for a week.

This Tech support has screwed up the ssh command on this server. Whenever i try to connect with ssh to one of our other servers, I get an error message: "bash: /usr/bin/ssh: Permission denied"

It does not matter which user I use, I even tried as root user, but every time I haven't got the permission to execute it.

I can't even execute the help file 'ssh --help'. I think it's rather easy to solve, but I don't know how

Thanks Arian

jschiwal · 11-12-2007, 05:57 AM

Check the permissions of the ssh command itself:

Code:

ls -l /usr/bin/ssh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 311216 2007-10-17 20:05 /usr/bin/ssh

You may have rwx----- permissions.

Another potential gotcha is the permissions of your private key:

Code:

-rw------- 1 jschiwal jschiwal 1675 2007-11-11 21:07 id_rsa

ssh will refuse to run if anyone else could read the file.
Given that "ssh --help" gives you a permission error, it sounds like the permissions on the ssh client (/usr/sbin/ssh) are wrong rather than an authentication problem.

Also, since the error message comes from bash rather than ssh or PAM, this also indicates a permission problem with the /usr/bin/ssh file.

Abstractt · 11-12-2007, 06:14 AM

You're right, this was the problem. I chmod the command and it's working now. Thanks