Digital Ocean – Caps stuck, unable to login, etc…

Usually I just use root-password to setup a server for the first time, but this time I decided to try SSH key upon creating the server – instead of adding it afterwards. That was a bad move.

I didn’t find any root-password. Probably because Digital Ocean don’t tell you that if you select SSH-key.

When trying to login, I got the error «No supported authentication methods available (server sent public key)».

• Reset root password on the droplet, in Digital Ocean.
• The password will be sent to you by mail.
• Use Digital Ocean server console to login as root.

I tried to add the SSH key from the console, but I could not paste it, because the console somehow was stuck in CAPS-mode or something weird. If I turned on CAPS, the console input was lowercase – but all was uppercase when pasting something.

• Type $ vi /etc/ssh/sshdconfig
• Change PasswordAuthentication from “no” to “yes” and save the file
• $ sudo systemctl restart sshd OR $ sudo service sshd restart
• Now you should be able to login with putty

Credits: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/problem-with-copy-paste-into-digitalocean-droplet-s-console-window

I didn’t really find a good solution for this. Google say it can be solved by something like:

• Restart server
• SHIFT + CAPS
• or type setleds -D +caps

Source: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/console-stuck-in-caps-lock-mode

There is a lot of guides for this on Google, so I’m just writing the short version for myself in the future.

• Generate SSH key with PuTTYgen
• Save the private/public file
• Open pageant and add the file there.

If you don’t have a ssh file, I think it can be added to your .ssh folder in C:\Users\<username>\.ssh, named id_rsa and id_rsa.pub. That file works for me without pageant, but not other files.