The PermitOpen feature is unfortunately very broken on all versions of SUSE. The reason is that they've patched[1] their sshd to not write a PID file, so we are unable to send a SIGHUP to get it to reload the configuration. [1] https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/SUSE:SLE-12-SP2:Update/openssh.17573/openssh-7.2p2-no_fork-no_pid_file.patch?expand=1 We need to find a different mechanism to get sshd to reload its configuration for this feature to work on SUSE.