Linux – SSH doesn’t ask for password, gives “permission denied” immediately

Ok. Sorry to bother everyone. I found the issue of my situation. In my EC2 server, under the /root/.ssh/ directory is a file called config.

This file had the following settings:

StrictHostKeyChecking no
CheckHostIP no

PasswordAuthentication no

I change the PasswordAuthentication from no to yes.

And that fixed the situation. I hope this helps other people.

Try ssh -o PasswordAuthentication=yes -o PreferredAuthentications=keyboard-interactive,password -o PubkeyAuthentication=no host.example.org

In ssh v2, keyboard-interactive is another way to say "password". The -o PubkeyAuthentication=no option instructs the client not to attempt key pair authentication.

In addition, the PasswordAuthentication=yes option is to override any previously configured ssh options that may have disabled it.