12.04 server oddity

[Tyler J. Wagner]

On 2013-05-09 08:40, Phil Dobbin wrote:
> Interesting. ssh was working & got all the way to the password prompt
> before permission was denied ('password/public key').

That's definitely not a firewall issue, then. Questions:

1. Are you logging in as the root user, or the user you created during
installation? The root user has no password by default, so you wouldn't be
able to login.

2. It's possible that SSH is configured so that root cannot login by
password, in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

PermitRootLogin without-password

I don't know if that's the default now. If so, you need to login as the
other user and sudo, then set a root password and change that line.

> I know of several people in my situation who'd have just swore at the
> situation, deleted offending distro & gone ahead & installed either
> Debian or CentOS (time is money & all that) & that'd been that.

I understand their frustration, but all distros now have this problem. Init
isn't serial anymore, it's event-driven. That means we need a way to
interact with the user at boot time when there are prompts, such as during
fsck. And some users like splash screens. These things are in conflict, and
Plymouth is our best solution. I am surprised that older ATI hardware has
issues on modern kernels.

There is certainly a modeline you could pass to the kernel at boot time
that will drive your display, even at a low resolution. But you'd have to
work that out while you had console access.

Regards,
Tyler

-- 
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time;
premature optimization is the root of all evil."
   -- Donald Knuth