How to enable SSH root access in Horizon Workspace Virtual Machines

If you followed my previous posts you know how often and how useful is to SSH into a virtual appliance in Horizon Workspace and most of the time the commands you issue need to be run as ‘root’.

By default root access is not allowed via SSH and in order to get ‘root’ prompt you have to SSH as the user ‘sshuser’ with the same password as ‘root’ and then run:

su -




This can be annoying in particular using SCP to copy files because you are limited to ‘sshuser’ home directory and this force us to log back in as ‘root’ again to move the files we just copies.

In actuality there is a way to enable ‘root’ access straight from SSH to make things faster.

WARNING: I’M DESCRIBING THIS PROCEDURE FOR THE SAKE OF LEARNING BUT BY NO MEANS I SUGGEST TO DO THIS IN PRODUCTION BECAUSE IT WILL MOST LIKELY VIOLATE YOUR SECURITY POLICY.

1. Connect to each VA console via vSphere Client or WebClient
2. Select “Login” and enter as “root”
3. vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
4. Find “PermitRootLogin”
5. Change “PermitRootLogin” from “no” to “yes” and save the file
6. service sshd restart

The “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” file should look like this:

#HostKeys for protocol version 2
#HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
#HostKey /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key

# Lifetime and size of ephemeral version 1 server key
#KeyRegenerationInterval 1h
#ServerKeyBits 1024

# Logging
# obsoletes QuietMode and FascistLogging
#SyslogFacility AUTH
#LogLevel INFO

# Authentication:

#LoginGraceTime 2m
PermitRootLogin yes	# default is no
#StrictModes yes
#MaxAuthTries 6
#MaxSessions 10

#RSAAuthentication yes
#PubkeyAuthentication yes

Now you can log in as ‘root’ directly from SSH.