When you order a Vyatta gateway appliance from Softlayer, you will see two accounts are created as Vyatta admin in Softlayer customer portal and on the device as well.

The first account is vyatta and the other account is “root” account. Both accounts are admin-level account.

By default, you can’t use root account to remotely SSH in Vyatta gateway. Most of time, it is recommended not to use root account to log in Vyatta gateway due to security concern. However, sometimes you do need to use root account to remotely SSH in Vyatta when you have no console access to the Vyatta gateway.

So how you can change the default behavior to SSH in Vyatta remotely?

It is quite easy!

Step 0: Backup the sshd_config file under the directory /etc/ssh

cp sshd_config sshd_config.bak

Step 1: change the setting as below in sshd_config file to allow root account remotely log in.

Change: PermitRootLogin no

To: PermitRootLogin yes

Step 2: Restart the SSH dameon

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Then you can SSH in your Vyatta gateway remotely.

Note: Please perform security risk assessment when you allow root account to SSH in Vyatta remotely. Possibly extra access controls (e.g. only allow specific IPs) need to be in place as risk mitigation.