Hetzner's VNC console sucks

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Created on 2026/06/29

Yep, you read that right, it’s not usable when it should be.

The problem

My website got unreachable twice and each time it was a struggle to put it back (via hard reset of course).

I rebuild the server, change the root password, but then when I try to ssh to it, it asks a password. Yet it refuses the root password I juste recreated.

To fix that you have to use Hetzner’s console, but it has several flaws :

• It’s unscrollable.
• You cannot select text.
• Your keyboard will always be treated as QWERTY, even if it’s not. Changing your keyboard layout virtually does nothing.
• To paste text, you have to right click then select “Paste text” for some reason, because Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+V and Shift+Insert don’t work.
• The pasted input is converted to QWERTY, meaning that symbols get converted as well. For example the pipe character | becomes a backslash \, so non-QWERTY users must test each key to find the corresponding one.

How to avoid it as much as possible

1. Copy your SSH public key (from your device).
2. Back to Hetzner console (won’t be long don’t worry), type nano .ssh/authorized_keys . Tilde is not mandotory if you’re already inside the home directory.
3. Paste your public key.
4. Add the following permissions: chmod 700 .ssh and chmod 600 .ssh.
5. You can then ssh root@YOUR_SERVER_IP without having to type a password that you don’t know anyway, hurray!