This sounds to me like you're logging in through Lish, instead of sshing in directly to your IP address.

https://www.linode.com/members/remote.cfm

http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/LISH

-Chris

Yup. I just figured it out too. For some reason teraterm would not let me log in as root. So I went in as my account username which brought up lish, and then logged in from there. So for some reason lish makes it very hard to use emacs. However I am using the same IP address in both cases.

Anyway I just used putty and got in as root, using challenge-response, and ctrl-a and ctrl-s work correctly.

That was wierd. Any idea why?

Lish connects you to the screen session your UML runs in. Control-A is the "command" character for screen. Check it: Log into Lish, then type: Control-A followed by a "d" (without control). It takes you to Lish's command prompt. Type help there to get a menu. It's good stuff.

Also, it's one or the other. Either you're accessing the host to connect to Lish, or you're connecting directly to your Linode's sshd through its IP address…

-Chris

When you access the lish shell you're talking to the linode management interface, and not to your own linode. This "lish" interface allows you to access the console of your linode and do other things (like force a hard reboot). Because you're talking to the management interface you need to login as the account username/password setup to manage linode.

Under normal circumstances you should not normally need to do this.

Because of how the management interface works, control-a, control-s, control-q and a few other characters may be "stolen".

Normally you want to log into your own linode instance.

What you did with putty was log into your linode, and that's why it worked.

Ah, of course I had forgotten I was under screen.

Also wondered why challenge-response is required, and ordinary login is not accepted, but it is not a big deal.

Thanks.

Matt