tty device is not owned by group `tty’

If you’re unable to SSH into a VPS server, try accessing the VPS from the OpenVZ hardware node.

[root@VS ~]# vzctl enter 1022
entered into VE 1022
mesg: error: tty device is not owned by group `tty’

Here you can see that there is an error related to tty. This error can be resolved by changing the group of the tty files.

vzctl exec 1022 'chgrp tty /dev/ttyp* /dev/ptyp*'

(PS: 1022 is the VE id of the VPS running on the hardware node VS)

There can be many other reasons related to SSH failures.

You might like check on udev package also (You will normally find this issue on CentOS5)

Find the udev rpm on the VPS server,

root@vps1 [/]# rpm -qa | grep udev
udev-095-14.16.el5

Remove it from the server
root@vps1 [/]# rpm -e –nodeps udev

Once this is done, your SSH should start working fine.