When I ssh -X myusername@console.cust.arpnetworks.com I first got a standard ssh query and I gave it a yes. It wouldn't connect and now I can't connect. Where is the ssh info it wants,and how do I supply it? ifthen: It requires an ssh key and won't work with a password I gave it a key or thought I did where is that key ...thanks http://support.arpnetworks.com/kb/vps/out-of-band-management that's where I came from. Another question. I tried the osx VNC to access out of band and it didn't work either. any thoughts? ifthen: use 'Chicken of the VNC' ifthen: Sounds like you need up_the_irons then. The ssh console is working for me nestea :) I did see that chicken program, are u using it? yep plett: what happened on your first hook-up with ssh? It looks like ssh wants a cut and paste line from somewhere for the console. I miss the good old telnet days before hackers. later... before hackers? lol It was nice to xdmcp over the Internet and not know that it was dumb. almost as dumb as trying to use Active Directory to set up a srvtab for a router... but that's another story. Can someone point me to an explanation of the protocol used to ssh to console.cust.arpnetworks.com ? http://support.arpnetworks.com/kb/vps/out-of-band-management explains it pretty well left maybe I should try reading it again but can you think of something more basic? my usual way of sshing doesn't work there. well, it depends on the OS you're using from osx did you generate an SSH public key and send that to the arpnetworks guys? I don't know how to do it. I just answered the ssh questions and got a mssg wrong protocol ah, ok basically you're attempting password (keyboard-interactive actually) authentication, but arpnetworks has that disabled this article should point you in the right direction: http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_generate_an_SSH_key_pair_in_Mac_OS.html beautiful. will go check it out. thanks after you've done that, you'll need to send the contents of the public part of that key to arp which should be in ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub I think that's the missing link here I'm going to try it. keyboard interactive is all I've ever done. bbl yeah, pubkey is a little more advanced, but it's actually really slick once you get it working read up on ssh-agent as well to see why it makes life easier I will do that. The spider tried 7 times. bye