Access Recovery
If you’ve lost the private key of an SSH key pair used to log into a Fedora system, and do not have any password logins set up to use at the console, you can gain access back to the machine with the following steps:
-
When booting the system, intercept the GRUB menu and edit the entry to append
init=/bin/bash`
-
Wait for the system to boot into a shell prompt
Execute the following commands:
-
mount -t selinuxfs selinuxfs /sys/fs/selinux
-
/sbin/load_policy
-
passwd root
-
sync
-
/sbin/reboot -ff
Or alternatively, you can manually attempt to update e.g. ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
.
Note that Fedora by default does not allow SSH login via password authentication.
Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›