The core issue of this thread, that basically is a unresponsive provider VNC service, couldn't be solved by me unfortunately. The VNC becomes absolutely unresponsive to keyboard input once the server has booted into the installed OS. The VNC does respond to keyboard input before the OS starts booting (e.g. the virtual BIOS or a mounted OS ISO).
I tried two of three VNC versions a) the HTML5 VNC with a up to date version of Firefox and b) the normal VNC with the latest version of RealVNC VNC client. Neither worked once the OS started booting. Unfortunately Java is no longer supported in Firefox and therefore I couldn't try out the Java VNC that was also included in SolusVM. Unfortunately despite having Java 8 Update 221 installed on my system... Internet Explorer 11 as bad as it is didn't work for the Java VNC either (Java Add-Ons were both enabled).
I'm afraid that this VNC issue is out of my or the users control and might need to be looked into by the provider. I cannot 100% safely assume that it might still something that the end user could fix. Maybe a certain software package inside the OS is missing. I don't have a clue though. The last time I had a Xen (PV) VPS was back in 2013/2014 on FreeVPS.us and I never had a Xen-HVM VPS with SolusVM.
The issue related to not being able to login as root via SSH due to this feature being disabled from Debian 9 and upwards has been solved. You can read how I managed to enable root login and reset the password below.
What I did was the following:
1) I set up the boot order to boot from "CD ROM only" and mounted the Debian 9 ISO.
2) I reboot the VPS from SolusVM and connected to the VNC using the RealVNC VNC client.
3) In the boot menu of the Debian 9 ISO I opened up the advanced menu.
4) In the advanced boot menu I selected and started the rescue mode.
5) Once the rescue mode was loaded up I have set up a few basic things (language, keyboard, timezone) and then I configured the rescue mode to mount /dev/xvda1 (the partition that contains the installed Debian 9 OS) as the root / partition with a shell to run commands in.
6) Using the shell with the mounted partition I could access /etc/ssh/sshd_config with nano and set "PermitRootLogin" to "yes" from "without-password". I saved the file normally via nano afterwards.
7) I didn't know the root password so I have reset it using the normal way by simply running the "passwd" command. In rescue mode you are already a root user and when you mount the partition where the OS is and run passwd or other commands you actually change files, user passwords and etc of the installed OS on the server without being booted into that OS.
8) Once I reset the password I enter "exit" and after that I selected the option to reboot the system.
9) In SolusVM I changed the boot order to "Hard Disk Only" and unmounted the Debian 9 ISO and rebooted the VPS again.
10) I turned puTTY on, entered the IP of the server and could login with the root user and password I set during the rescue operation. Ding! I was in.
Would the VNC not work in the virtual BIOS and the mounted OS ISOs then there could have been nothing I could have done as the VNC of SolusVM is basically the only mean of emergency access. And in our case it is useless already once the installed OS has booted.
![[Image: zHHqO5Q.png]](https://i.imgur.com/zHHqO5Q.png)
