Allow root access via SSH on CentOS

If you see the message: “Please login as the user “centos” rather than the user “root”  we need to allow root access via SSH.

• Login as the user “centos”:
  # ssh -i PrivateKey.pem centos@Floating-IP-Address
• Change to root:
  # sudo -s
• Edit the file “/root/.ssh/authorized_keys”
  # vi /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
  and keep it only contains the key  (starts with “sh-rsa”) without the restrictions that exist at the begining of the file.
• Open the sshd_config # vi/etc/ssh/sshd_config
  and uncomment the line “PermitRootLogin yes”
• Restart SSH daemon:
  # systemctl restart sshd

Now you can SSH as root to your instance, high five!