Change SSH Port in Ubuntu 24

Yet another entry after a while. Today, I will draft the necessary steps to change SSH Port in Ubuntu 24. These might apply to other version of Ubuntu but tbh, I don’t care.

As in the previous version of Ubuntu / Debian, we normally need to change the listening ports in the sshd_config, and then allowing in the firewall will be fine. However for later Ubuntu such as Ubuntu 24, we need to change the ssh.socket ones. So I will note necessary steps in this article. Assume that we are going to change SSH port to 888.

First, just specifying a custom listening port in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/10-custom-ssh.conf to add the custom port as follows

Port 888

Next, we need to also edit the ssh.socket info as follows

systemctl edit ssh.socket

The above command will edit the file /etc/systemd/system/ssh.socket.d/override.conf. Then, input the following content

[Socket]
ListenStream=
ListenStream=888

Remember that the ListenStream= is required to specify that we do not use the default port 22 any more.

Then, finally just restart both the ssh service and the ssh.socket as follows:

systemctl restart ssh
systemctl restart ssh.socket

Do not forget that if you are using any firewall, please open the new port (888) in the corresponding firewall.