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Unable to log in on shell account (sh.sonic.net)

Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 8:36 am
by lpdma
I've had sonic's Fusion service at my new residence for a week. I've verified with tech support that shell access is enabled on my account. However, when I try to log in with ssh on sh.sonic.net using the username and password that work on members.sonic.net, the login fails -- it just prompts for the password again. The same thing happens with the out-of-the-box ssh client on both Ubuntu Linux 14.04 and OpenBSD 6.4. I called tech support, and the result was very unsatisfactory -- rather than referring the ticket (#5967495) to the engineering team, or giving me an e-mail address or phone #, they said post the question here.

What perplexes me is that when I tried logging in on a couple of other sites, and deliberately provided an invalid password, I got an error message from my ssh client saying "Password invalid, please try again": when logging in on sh.sonic.net, I just got the password prompt again with no error message. I turned on verbose logging (-vvv) in the ssh client, and it didn't show any error message coming back from the server: it just re-prompted for the password. To me this suggests strongly that there is a problem with the server: the OpenBSD client, at least, is pretty recent (2018), so it seems unlikely that there's a protocol incompatibility.

I hope someone can help me past this problem. I don't want to do anything exotic with the shell account, mostly just use it to check the behavior of some common Unix utilities when my desktop version doesn't do what I expect.

Re: Unable to log in on shell account (sh.sonic.net)

Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2020 9:07 pm
by lr
> However, when I try to log in with ssh on sh.sonic.net using the
> username and password that work on members.sonic.net, the
> login fails -- it just prompts for the password again.

Just checked it with my account: works just fine. When using ssh key authentication, I don't get prompted for password. If I disable ssh key authentication, I do get prompted for password, and login works fine. And yes, it is the same password as used for the webmail and the members page.

> when logging in on sh.sonic.net, I just got the password prompt
> again with no error message.

Tried that, deliberately logged in with the wrong password, I just get the "Password:" prompt again. Note that there are many different ssh daemon versions and configurations.

Here is the debug output when I turn on key authentication and deliberately enter a wrong password the first time:

Code: Select all

debug3: authmethod_lookup keyboard-interactive
debug3: remaining preferred: password
debug3: authmethod_is_enabled keyboard-interactive
debug1: Next authentication method: keyboard-interactive
debug2: userauth_kbdint
debug2: we sent a keyboard-interactive packet, wait for reply
debug2: input_userauth_info_req
debug2: input_userauth_info_req: num_prompts 1
Password: <- This is where I entered 12345 as a password
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,keyboard-interactive
debug2: userauth_kbdint
debug2: we sent a keyboard-interactive packet, wait for reply
debug2: input_userauth_info_req
debug2: input_userauth_info_req: num_prompts 1
Password: <- This is where I entered the correct password
debug2: input_userauth_info_req
debug2: input_userauth_info_req: num_prompts 0
debug1: Authentication succeeded (keyboard-interactive).
Authenticated to sh.sonic.net ([208.201.242.22]:22).
debug1: channel 0: new [client-session]
debug3: ssh_session2_open: channel_new: 0
debug2: channel 0: send open
debug1: Requesting no-more-sessions@openssh.com
debug1: Entering interactive session.
debug1: client_input_global_request: rtype hostkeys-00@openssh.com want_reply 0
debug2: callback start
debug2: fd 3 setting TCP_NODELAY
debug3: ssh_packet_set_tos: set IP_TOS 0x10
debug2: client_session2_setup: id 0
debug2: channel 0: request pty-req confirm 1
debug1: Sending environment.
I think the problem is on your end. Are you sure you are using the correct password?