Emacs 24.3.1 TRAMP hangs on opening file

Question

I am running graphical Emacs 24.3.1 (this problem exists when using the console version as well) on Arch Linux. I am trying to use TRAMP to open files on a remote Fedora system by SSH with a private key which requires a password. Authentication works fine, and so does the listing of files. When I do try to open a file, my Emacs session hangs with "Tramp: Inserting `/{filename I'm trying to open}' ...done". It is not possible to abort with ESC ESC ESC or C-g. Does anyone have a solution to this?

Greenland

The tramp-verbose variable should probably be your first port of call. – Budge

Same problem here. It happens to me using ssh on tramp with password authentication (not using public key). – Ban

You might want to read this: emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode#toc5 – Ban

I wasn't able to find anything relating to my problem on the above emacswiki link, but I found a link somewhere saying that setting tramp-verbose to 5 could indeed solve the hangs. I tried it, and now I can indeed open files on the remote host. I then tried removing the (setq tramp-verbose 5) from my .emacs again so that I could tell you the message in the minibuffer when it hangs, but miraculously, I can still open files. – Greenland

And once again it's not opening new files. The message in my minibuffer now, just after trying to open a file is: Tramp: Inserting `filename'...done. – Greenland

Answer 1

Emacs 24 normally works very well with Tramp. What you might need is ControlMasterAuto in your .ssh/config file. This will ensure that the ssh connection information passes seamlessly to Emacs. This will also ensure that you only need to login once in a terminal and use multiple emacs frames in tramp mode. I have detailed the following steps

(1) Go to your .ssh/config file and add the following options

Host <hostname>
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/%r@%h:%p
ServerAliveCountMax=30
ServerAliveInterval=5

(2) Now login to the remote host through terminal.

(3) Open emacs frame and try opening the remote files through tramp (/ssh:). You must be able to connect to the remote host.

The above steps should work even for a two level authentication (using a rsa key +password).

Undesigning

On opening a file with path /ssh:host:path, all works as advertised. Thanks for the tip. I would like to add that using ssh -Nf host allows you to keep your master connection open in the background, so that you don't accidentally close it. – Greenland

Answer 2

This thread is old - however, a very similar problem on my FC22 laptop (tramp hanging when trying to type a colon following /su in the minibuffer) appears to be fixed by commenting the ::1 line in /etc/hosts.

Apomict