Lukáš Mešťan

Software engineer with a background in full-stack Web development & Open Source Enthusiast.

SSH was not starting correctly on system startup

Wednesday. January 30, 2019 - 1 min

Problem

In case your reboot your linux server and:

• your SSH was not starting correctly,
• and you can’t connect to server via ssh,

you have a problem with start SSH service.

As first, find error

Try to connect to your server localy or via web-terminal provided by your server provider.

Secondly, check if ssh service has started ps aux | grep ssh, if not, try to start it manually with command sudo service ssh start. If you see something like this: ssh.service: Unit entered failed state. Try these steps:

• check your syslog with cat /var/log/syslog | grep ssh, and when you see: Missing privilege separation directory: /var/run/sshd continue reading :),
• the following command tells you if configuration file are valid or incorrect /usr/sbin/sshd -T,
• if the configuration test does not return any errors, you can start /usr/sbin/sshd -ddd in debugging mode, this will provide you with a detailed startup of the service.

Solution is simple

You’ll need to create this directory:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/sbin/sshd

• -p is an argument to the mkdir command, it means “parents”, meaning mkdir will create a directory and any parents that don’t already exist.

Than you can start your SSH server:

sudo service ssh start

And that’s all.