Rebooting: quick tip

Note to self: whenever rebooting a server, login via SSH and restart the OpenSSH daemon first to validate that it will come back up.

I just updated an AWS instance and rebooted it without doing this. Some new update in OpenSSH required that the AuthorizedKeysCommandUser be defined if AuthorizedKeysCommand is defined and the OpenSSH daemon will not start.

Luckily I can tell puppet to fix this and will be able to login in 30 minutes but that’s 30 minutes I’d prefer not to wait.