This doesn't answer the question directly, but if your intent is simply to administer your machine remotely, it is generally considered preferable and safer to log in as a non-root user, then elevate your privileges once you have started a session on the server.
In other words, instead of using ssh root@yourserver, you may wish to log in as yourself (your own distinct username and account) then run sudo bash
or even su
and to authenticate as root once logged in. You can also prepend most commands with sudo
to have that command run with root's privilege level, e.g.,:
sudo cp /etc/configthing.conf /etc/configthing.conf.orig
or
sudo rm -i /var/log/syslog.3.gz
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
to see if root login is allowed.sudo su
when I need root.su or sudo -i
but i need to usessh root@my-ip
.