Justin Latimer

OpenELEC SSH Issues

Have you found you can't connect to your Raspberry Pi running OpenELEC even though SSH is enabled? This happened to me, so I thought I'd write down what happened in case anyone else does the same thing. It actually took me quite a while to work out.

Around the time of the first release of Kodi, I was running OpenELEC 4.2.1 on my Raspberry Pi. I use USB drive for storage to speed things up because I have an average SD card. Unfortunately I forgot to turn of auto updates for add ons, and some of them auto updated to Kodi versions and broke. Rollback didn't work. So when OpenELEC 5.0 was released, I thought I'd do a fresh install. I formatted my SD and USB and imaged them. But even though I could successfully go through the OpenELEC installer, I couldn't connect over SSH!

Turns out when I formatted the USB, I accidently formatted it FAT32 instead of ext4. This meant that the SSH process couldn't create the key files because FAT32 doesn't support the right permissions model. It took me a while to figure this out, especially without being able to SSH in... Luckily OpenELEC makes log files accessible via Samba if you enable that. Once I formatted the USB drive ext4, everything worked perfectly!

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