Terminal in Yosemite shows a strange dot in password field of Terminal while establishing a SSH connection. This was not the case with Maverics. Kindly suggest a resolution. Finally, even correct passwords are failing logins.

I have this problem too. Here is the strange dot cursor described while highlighted:

Interestingly, I first noticed the "cannot log in" problem today when I tried to log into my home computer from work.

To log in remotely, I am coming in through my Apple Airport Extreme, which forwards ssh connections to a small netbook I have running Linux. Once logged into the netbook, I can use ssh to log into my Mac Mini--or, rather, I was previously able to.

Today, from work, I noticed that I could still get into the netbook, but I got the "password just won't work" problem that the op here notes.

I also noticed that my netbook was telling me that the RSA key fingerprint of my Mac Mini had changed, but I assumed that was due to the upgrade to Yosemite.

Anyway, I came home and sure enough, the ssh login failure happens here too.

ssh server just seems to be broken. I cannot log into my Mac at all.

Bug in the release version of Yosemite?

I'm not sure if I logged into the Yosemite beta or not using ssh, but I suspect I did.

I couldn't agree more.

Clearly this is not a common problem, or it would be noted and fixed.

It's impossible that people who do anything server related are having this problem and it's not getting fixed.

I have found the additional information on this issue:

1. the "dot" in the cursor is gone for me now.

2. I cannot log in through ssh with any non-administrator account.

3. I CAN log in through ssh with my admin account.

I suspect something has changed in the ssh server setup between Mavericks and Yosemite. I am not an admin guru though, so cannot comment on what that might be.

This is irritating (and unsafe--why should I be entering an admin password when a normal user will do?).

Follow up:

The solution is to go to:

System Preferences->Sharing

Make sure the checkbox for Remote Login is checked.

Check the "Allow access for: All users" radio button.

Longer story:

I have sshd running as a service on a non-standard port. So it does not start with the System Preferences application.

In testing this just now, I ALSO turned on sshd using the "System Preferences->Sharing" preference pane by checking the "Remote Login" check box, which is how most people would turn on ssh.

I noticed that the "Only these users:" radio button was checked by default and the "Administrators" group was highlighted (and it was the only item in the list).

I switched that to "All users" and was able to log into ssh again on EITHER the standard ssh port OR my custom port.

Clearly that preference pane flipped a switch in an sshd setting file somewhere, relieving me of the need to go looking through the sshd docs to find the setting.

The dot is the new cursor graphic for secure input (passwords).

ssh log in is working fine.

This cursor image is meant to evoke the bullets seen when entering passwords in OS X, but it is not an actual character.

It's a cursor variant that indicates that you’re at a password (or similar) prompt and that your input will not be echoed. Specifically, it means that the tty is currently in canonical (line-buffered) mode and echo is off.

Perhaps more importantly, it indicates that the input methods are currently restricted to Roman-only in order to avoid displaying your password in the input-method buffer, which normally is either displayed in a separate window or inline within the terminal before you commit the input and send it to the tty. Resetting the terminal with Shell > Send Reset will remove this restriction if you need to enter other characters.

This is displayed to indicate the state of the tty and does not alter input. However, if your password contains non-Roman characters, you may find that you cannot enter it, depending on the input method and keyboard layout you’re using, and whether they require using the input method buffer to enter. If your password does not contain non-Roman characters, then issues with logging in are unrelated to this.

You can test whether you can successfully enter your password by using the following (bash) command, which emulates a password prompt and displays whatever you enter (and displays control characters, to ensure nothing unexpected was entered):

$ read -sp Prompt: && printf '\n%s\n' "$REPLY" | cat -v

Threw me for a loop too, but in the end, all I had to do was ignore the strange dot and enter my password for a successful login.

After following the suggested remedy, I still can NOT enter the pw for my SSH key file.

This past Christmas, my wife bought me a new iMac and I told her to please bring it back ... so we did.

The clerk at London Drugs (Canadian store chain) was surprised when I told him that I will not pay $2000+ Dollars for something that doesn't work 100%!

Back then, Yosemite could not (and still can not) deal with gmail.

If I pay premium money, I expect a decent product. the iMac is OK but so are many machines running Windows 10. Lately, I prefer those to my iMac.

It is pathetic that no one at Apple knows how to fix this.