In the past I and others have had no problem with x2go client logins to Ubuntu/Debian x2goservers.

However, sometime n the past year or two of Ubuntu & Debian OS updates something changed which caused the normal x2goclient session profile that requires the UserID -and- Password to be entered would fail giving an error message on the client that says:

Access denied. Authentication that can continue: publickey,keyboard-interactive

I finally found out the reason for this change in behavior and here's how to fix it.

Get a terminal session with your x2goserver and edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config


in /etc/ssh/sshd_config (example was copied from Ubuntu 12.04) you will see the following entries:


To fix this CHANGE   PasswordAuthentication to "yes" and save the file and restart ssh


REASON for the failure & change of behavior from previous/older versions of Ubuntu.
I installed several older versions of Ubuntu going back to Ubuntu 9.10 and found that the installations of the Ubuntu Server changed the content of the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file!

In older systems the entry for PasswordAuthentication either said:


where the PasswordAuthentication line was commented out ... which then defaulted it to "YES"
-or-
the Password Authentication line was actually uncommented BUT set to "YES"


So those older OS versions and x2go would work using login ID's and Passwords.

Sometime during one of the Ubuntu 11.x releases the PasswordAuthentication entry was actually changed to "no" as is the case in Ubuntu 12.04 servers and the line was left not commented out so it was active...


That is what caused the failure of x2go logins using passwords and would present the user with that error message:

Access denied. Authentication that can continue: publickey,keyboard-interactive

I've made this change now and no longer see the problem on my servers so I wanted to share this info.

Brian