alt Hacker NewsDid anyone get it to work? I tried on the official alpine docker image, enabled password login for root. The shadow entry has ! as password by default, this didn't work with a > 256 character password (i also did passwd -l which also does !). I manually changed it to * and it still didn't work.
Am I doing anything wrong here?
OpenSSH_10.3p1, OpenSSL 3.5.9 29 Sep 2026
PRETTY_NAME="Alpine Linux v3.24"
Replies
Nope, wasn’t able to reproduced it in my firecracker VM, which isn’t publicly accessible anyway.
As far as I understand, it wont work on default setups. You need musl-c, no pam and openssh.
Did you try one incorrect standard password fail first?
EDIT: works after downgrading OpenSSH, turns out even EOL Alpine version got updated packages!
Also didn't have much luck on Alpine 3.20.10 with OpenSSH_9.7p1 which I've freshly installed from an official ISO.
Last two entries in /etc/shadow:
test:*:20762:0:99999:7:::
q3k:$6$snip.GgDQNTrqqX.A0:20762:0:99999:7:::
No, didn't work for me open OpenWRT x64 running in a container but that is probably 'cause I'm using dropbear instead of openssh-server. That's what OpenWRT uses by default so the impact there will be minimal assuming that most installations don't change to openssh-server - it isn't installed by default.
I can't reproduce it either. I used alpine:3.24.1 and openssh is openssh-server-10.3_p1-r2
I tried adding PermitRootLogin yes and PasswordAuthentication yes. Tried adding another user with a valid password.
Verified shadow entry has a *. Can't login as root or a test user. Tried another incorrect password first as well.
edit: can reproduce after `git revert 384e25e6bd1f2e7b30095900e48b570d46953510` in aports and rebuilding openssh without the fix. It also accepts the password on the 2nd+ attempt, NOT the first.
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It's because alpine has updated all openssh-server packages already. Even from EOL alpine versions.