I have a Linux VPS and I just ran pkill to kill a user because I was not able to do usermod. But after I did that I wasn't able to login anymore on that user, so I googled a bit and saw some posts what said you just have to reboot. Thats what I did but I am still not able to connect, so I went over to my host and decided to restart the server, that didn't work either... I am able to connect via recovery mode but I just don't really know how to fix this.
Can someone help me out?
Boot your VM, log in via the console and carry out some diagnostics.
I would start by checking to see if sshd is running by using ps and (ss -tnlp |netstat -tnlp). If it's not running check your logs to see if it left any error messages. Check also that it is configured to start when the system boots.
If it is running then I would ensure that I am trying to connect on the correct port with ssh.
I would check that my firewall is not blocking the port that sshd is listening on.
Beyond the above it depends upon what you find as to what you do next.
