Problem with "Shell link"




In MC, the option "Shell link" from the drop-down menu is supposed to provide in the relevant one of the two MC panels a display of the directory structure of another machine, to which one connects by ssh.

In general, this option works for me well enough. But there is a machine at work to which I need to connect for which it does not work. What I would hope is that, if nothing else, someone can point me toward ways to diagnose the problem or to get some debug output so that the problem can be traced.

The (remote) machine for which the "Shell link" option seems to fail is a central server machine at my university. I have an account on that machine, and I can access that account by ssh (name of that machine). Then, no problem. I get a password prompt, and I log in, and I get a command prompt.

But if I start MC and do from one of the panels the "Shell link" option, then what happens is, I get a password prompt, then type the password, and after that a blank screen. If I type a deliberately wrong password, then it is rejected and I get asked again for the password (probably indicating that the problem does not occur at this step). If I type the right password, then the terminal (or xterm, it makes no difference) just hangs. Nothing happens, except that one must open another terminal or xterm and kill the connection. To do this, I have to do "ps ax" and find the attempted ssh connection, and kill it.

The remote machine is running Linux, apparently Red Hat Enterprise Linux (uname output available if needed). The only peculiar thing about its setup is that it is running csh, and when I log in I have there a .profile file which tells it to start bash. And when I log out after doing a regular, command line connection I have to type exit to get out of bash, then type exit again to log out.

I do not know the underlying cause of the problem which I have just described. I have asked a couple of local IT people what might be causing the problem, and they do not seem to know, either.

Thus, unless someone has experienced similar problems and has some good guesses, it is very difficult to work toward a solution in the absence of debug output.

Does anyone have any clever suggestions?

Theodore Kilgore


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