9.1.3. How can the root user login

Keeping in line with general best practice, SIMP does not allow root to login to the system remotely or at local terminals by default.

However, there may be cases where you need to login as root for perfectly valid reasons. Enabling Terminal Logins

To allow root to login at the terminal, you will need to set the useradd::securetty Array to include all tty devices from which you wish to allow root access.

For example, to allow the root user to login at the first three virtual consoles and the first serial device, you would place the following in hiera:

  - tty0
  - tty1
  - tty2
  - ttyS0


If you are working on a system that was not installed from an ISO, you should do this before running simp bootstrap. Otherwise, unless you have set up other users, you may not be able to log into your system. Enabling Remote SSH Logins

If you need to allow remote root logins over SSH (we highly advise against this), you can add the following to hiera:

ssh::server::conf::permitrootlogin: true