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techstaff:vscode

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VSCode

Troubleshooting

Techstaff are not experts on VS Code or its proprietary SSH extension, but we can guess what's happening based on what we've seen with other students.

One thing that can prevent your ability to access the servers is if you've used VS Code and logged into more than one of our login servers simultaneously. linux.cs.uchicago.edu is actually a collection of several servers, so when you access that address your computer will pick a login server to use.

Using nslookup, dig, host, or another DNS lookup tool, you can see that linux.cs.uchicago.edu expands to linux1.cs.uchicago.edu, linux2.cs.uchicago.edu, and other servers up to linux5.

In this case, VS Code has started its server process for you on three of our login servers concurrently: linux1, linux4, and linux5. This can cause problems with VS Code, including a situation in which it just repeatedly prompts for a password, preventing you from connecting. (This appears to be what you're experiencing.) Additionally, this can often result in the directory ~/.vscode-server in your home directory on the server becoming corrupted in some way. Since VS Code will automatically recreate that directory when you reconnect, it's safe to delete it.

To try to clear this up you can try to run the script cleanup-vscode after sshing into one of the linux servers using Terminal.app, the WSL command line, or a linux terminal.

ssh cnetid@linuxN.cs.uchicago.edu

To fix this on your own, you could simply log into each of the linux.cs servers (using SSH), then the command pkill -u <CNETID> node, which will stop any running vscode-server processes. After you've stopped the processes on all the login servers, I'd also recommend removing the ~/.vscode-server directory to ensure that it's recreated when you connect next. (Otherwise, the contents of this directory can cause problems for later reconnect attempts.) To do this, just run rm -r ~/.vscode-server on any of the linux.cs servers. (Since your home directory is shared, you only need to do this once.) We've also recently created a script called cleanup-vscode which you can run on any of the servers (when connected directly using SSH) which will walk you through this process.

To help ensure that this doesn't happen again, you will want to configure VS Code to connect to one login server in particular instead of the group. That will ensure that you always reconnect to the same system you used previously, which means it'll be less likely that you'll accidentally end up trying to run this on two servers at the same time. I'd also recommend ensuring that VS Code is completely closed and no longer running on one computer before attempting to start it on a second computer.

/var/lib/dokuwiki/data/attic/techstaff/vscode.1615479341.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021/03/11 10:15 by kauffman

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