Symptoms
When installing Plesk via Plesk Web Installer (https://get.plesk.com/) using 'root' or a sudo user, initialization fails with the following error message:
Could not connect to the target server. Process exited with status 1
Cause
SSH configuration of the server does not allow 'root' login or/and password authentication:
-
The
or/and
PermitRootLogin
are disabled:
PasswordAuthentication# cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config | egrep 'PasswordAuthentication|PermitRootLogin' | grep -v "#"
PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no -
The
directive is enabled in the SSH configuration file but does not contain the
AllowUsers
user:
root# cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config | grep 'AllowUsers'
AllowUsers johndoe
Resolution
Enable 'root' user in SSH configuration.