6

So out of no where I was unable to SSH into my headless linux box.

So I hooked up a screen and started tooling with it.

My server is still fully functional and the box seems in tact. I just wouldn't let me SSH in.

So I tried follow a few online tutorials on adding my IP to the SSH allow file but nothing seemed to work.

I kept getting

"Network Connect: Connection Refused"

when attempting to SSH in with putty.

So I decided to nuke the iptables and do

sudo apt-get remove --purge iptables

which resulted in a failure.

Something like this

"processing tables for mandb " "fopen permission denied"

So I tried doing

sudo apt-get install iptables

which it said the same fopen error.

End result is my server is up and running but I have no ssh capabilities into my box. On that note though I do still have an active samba connection. Take that for what its worth.

5
  • 1
    funky errors like that always make me check that the disk isn't 100% full, which can lead to all sorts of strange behavior. Have you checked that (-- can you)? Feb 12, 2014 at 0:51
  • No idea if I am reading this right so I will post a photo Feb 12, 2014 at 0:54
  • looks good (Use% is less than 100). that's not the issue. Feb 12, 2014 at 1:00
  • Did you try to just stop iptables? /etc/init.d/iptables stop Feb 12, 2014 at 1:07
  • @RickHanlonII command not found. Guessing because the last thing I ran was the remove Feb 12, 2014 at 1:12

2 Answers 2

11

The fopen permission denied thing when doing apt-get or dpkg, is very often a sign that your manpages cache at /var/cache/man is owned by root:root instead of man:root. Try changing this with

   chown -R man:root /var/cache/man
0

I followed the instructions below and the problem was solved. I hope it works for you.

sudo apt autoremove
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

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