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Table of Contents
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.
Step by Step
- Open a terminal emulator. On Windows we suggest installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux. On MacOS open Terminal.app.
- You need to ssh into one of our linux servers.
ssh cnetid@linux.cs.uchicago.edu
- Ensure your are below your quota. Check your quota by running
csquota
.- If you are using all of your quota we usually see that
results.log
is the culprit. You can find the file or set of files using up your quota by using the commanddu -csh * .??*
. - Assuming it is
results.log
you probably don't want to delete it just yet as there is probably a process that still has it open and is still writing to it. Proceed and delete this file at the very end.
- Kill all the VS Code server processes on all linux.cs servers. Remember these were caused by using the round robin DNS name of
linux.cs.uchicago.edu
.- If you haven't changed the entry in your VS Code client you should do so now such that you specify a specific server. e.g.
linuxN.cs.uchicago.edu
whereN
is a number 1-5. - The general idea is to ssh into every linux.cs server and kill any VS Code server process you have running. This command will
pkill -u <CNETID> node
VS Code server. - The techstaff script
cleanup-vscode
will walk you through sshing to all nodes and killing the right processes. Feel free to look at the script to see what it is doing.
- Now you'll want to remove the
~/.vscode-server
directory. - IFF you found that
results.log
was using all of your quota you'll want to delete this now. - You should be able to reconnect with VS Code client now.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/troubleshooting#_improving-security-on-multi-user-servers https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh