This one's sort of got me scratching my head.

I have VSCode installed on Leap (15.3) and I've installed the SSH FS extension in an attempt to set up a connection to a directory tree on a Slackware system.

I have SSH keys set up that allow me to connect from Leap to Slackware (and vice versa) passwordlessly; I've been doing this without problems for a long time. However when I create a connection configuration pointing to a file tree on the Slackware system and attempt to connect to it, I receive an error stating that my key is not valid:
which doesn't make sense to me as I can connect via ssh from a bash prompt without any errors.

I get a similar error message about an invalid private key if I attempt to open a terminal to the Slackware system from within VSCode.

So...

I tried setting up the connection with a password. This is not the way I wanted to go since VSCode tells you that the password is saved in plaintext. But... it worked and I was able to connect though not using a secure method if the password is, indeed, stored as plaintext somewhere. (I grepped for the remote account's password within everything under $HOME/.vscode and was not able to find any files. It does, however, appear in plaintext in files under $HOME/Code. [ugh])

I suspect the errors I'm seeing have got something to do with some arcane aspect of how I should configure the remote connection but, frankly, the configuration screen/form looks logical enough. Apparently I'm missing something subtle (or maybe the extension didn't actually install properly).

Q1: Any ideas on what would cause VSCode + SSH FS to believe that my SSH key is invalid?

Q2: Could it be that the keys are actually not compatible with SSH FS? I haven't found anything that stated that I needed to create keys in a particular way that will play nice with this extension and it wouldn't be too awful to have to generate new keys if that's actually needed.


TIA... for any information about this.

Looking at this, I see
which suggests you need to configure from within VS Code.

I looked at Remote-SSH but was hoping to stick with SSH FS as that's what many of us at work have been using. Though, TBH, I've been sticking with an older release of that extension at work as the last upgrade rendered my connections unavailable. And the older version I've been using there is no longer downloadable. I guess that should have been evidence of trouble ahead, eh?

Thanks... I'll give Remote-SSH a shot. I'll report back if that extension gets me connected.

Update: Hmm... I have more digging to do but it looks like Remote-SSH requires/limits you to be connected to a single remote system at a time. Not what I'm looking for but like I mentioned... still digging but that's a bit of a show stopper if I don't see anything that gets around that.

Update #2: Ah... The downside of trying to configure software after doing it for 9-10 hours at work. It turns out I was misreading the blurb on the key specification field of the config form and botched the SSH setup withing SSH FS. Calling this solved.