BIG SCARY WARNING!!!¶

Permitting root logins is a VERY BAD IDEA, please consider the security ramifications of allowing root to remotely log in before continuing this guide. Adding a user to the wheel group or using sudo is a better practice.

Unlike many Linux distributions, FreeBSD by default disables ‘root’ login over SSH, If you do need to enable remote root logins over SSH, using key-based logins would be a good idea; the more secure way of gaining remote admin access to your server would ideally be logging in as an alternative user and then using SUDO to perform any administrative tasks.

• First edit the SSH daemon configuration file:
  

  vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  

• Find this line:
  

  #PermitRootLogin no
  

• and change it to:
  

  PermitRootLogin yes
  

Basically you should have removed the hash ‘#’ from the start of the line (uncomment the line basically) and then change ‘no’ to ‘yes’, save the file and then restart the SSH daemon like so..

service sshd restart

And your done, you should now be able to login as ‘root’ over SSH on your FreeBSD server!