I've banged my head on this one for several hours. No matter what, I cannot SSH from any other machines on the same local network using the root password or any other new users I've created.
This is all with ESXi 5.1 Update 1.
I made sure root and my new user were set up in the Client with Shell Access under User settings, and both are marked as Administrator under Permissions.
Then I have tried every combination of settings in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. I've tried setting 'PasswordAuthentication yes', 'PubkeyAuthentication no', UsePAM both yes and no, etc.
In between, I use /etc/init.d/SSH restart to reload the changes. I even started trying restarting the whole server, in case that was not making the changes take hold. I also tried stopping and starting SSH from Security Profile in the Client.
No matter what, with either user, when I try to log in, I put the right password in, but it acts as if it was wrong, and after the three tries I get the "Permission denied (publickey,password)." error.
The thing is, if I turned off public key auth, shouldn't it just say "(password)" in the final summary error? I've tried doing -v, and even -vvv, to try to see any other reasons, but I don't see anything useful. It almost seems as if the changes I am making in the config aren't ever taking effect, even after rebooting.
I have also searched for hours but I can't seem to find anyone who has this problem of using the RIGHT password but not getting access!
Also, I will mention that right now, this host is running standalone, with the Client attaching directly to it (no vCenter Server set up yet - in fact, this whole process is trying to get SSH file transfer abilities so I can upload my Windows ISO, as the upload from browsing datastore in the Client doesn't work for me due to port 902 being blocked).
Is there something really simple I am missing here?