Server refused to start a shell/command (Buildroot - RPi)

[Matt Johnston]

Hi,

If you run “dropbear -F -E” (kill the existing server process first) then it will run in the foreground and print logging. That should suggest what’s going wrong. Alternatively it might already be logging to somewhere in /var/log depending if syslog is running.

Cheers,
Matt

> On Tue 13/1/2015, at 9:24 pm, dropbear at procountsoftware.co.uk wrote:
> 
> I have a minimalistic buildroot system for the Raspberry Pi and would like
> to add a dropbear ssh server to it that is started and is available from
> boot, but for now I'm just trying to enable it manually and I'm having a
> few problems.
> 
> I enabled dropbear within 'make menuconfig' and rebuilt buildroot. It
> downloaded dropbear 2013.58 which I know is a little old, but it should
> still work, right?
> After booting my new system I didn't use S50dropbear itself but tried to do
> things manually. I created /etc/dropbear and within there I created the
> keys necessary for dropbear using:
> 
> dropbearkey -t rsa -f dropbear_rsa_host_key
> dropbearkey -t dss -f dropbear_dss_host_key
> 
> Then I executed dropbear (no arguments) and I could see it in the process
> list.
> 
> When I tried to connect to it from Putty, I got the following error:
> "Server refused to allocate pty" which I discovered was possibly due to not
> having a suitable mountpoint.
> So I added the following entry to FSTAB (as per a google post I found):
> 
>     none            /dev/pts        devpts        gid=5,mode=620    0 0
> 
> Now the error has changed to "Server refused to start a shell/command" and
> I haven't been able to find a solution. I can connect to the Pi using
> WinSCP over SCP fine, but I really want a command shell using PuTTY.
> 
> This may be more to do with my minimalistic buildroot configuration than
> anything else, but this is my first buildroot build so I'm a bit of a
> newbie. My starting point was the buildroot configuration used to create
> the RPi NOOBS recovery program.
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> mail2web.com  Enhanced email for the mobile individual based on Microsoft
> Exchange - http://link.mail2web.com/Personal/EnhancedEmail
> 
>