Remote SSH connection fails with "Failed to install server within the timeout"

Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

When connecting to a remote Linux server via SSH, Cursor repeatedly fails at the “Installing server” stage with the error Failed to install server within the timeout, even though the server-side components (multiplex server, code server) are started correctly and no download issues are observed.

The issue seems to occur right after the code server is launched, as the final handshake from the client never completes.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open Cursor (version 1.1.7)
  2. Attempt to SSH into a remote Linux server (Ubuntu 20.04 in my case)
  3. Eventually the connection fails with: Error installing server: Failed to install server within the timeout

Expected Behavior

After the code server is started, Cursor should complete the handshake and enter the remote editing session. This works perfectly in VS Code’s Remote-SSH but fails in Cursor 1.1.7

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

afa4f4f4d7f629d92a9365757b93c26d.png
afa4f4f4d7f629d92a9365757b93c26d.png3070×1660 595 KB

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.1.7 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: 7111807980fa9c93aedd455ffa44b682c0dc1350
Date: 2025-07-01T07:38:05.103Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

3

I believe my remote server is not the issue, since I’m able to connect to it using VS Code’s Remote-SSH without any problems.

However, when using Cursor to connect to the same server, it fails during the cursor-server download stage (as shown in the attached logs). I tried manually downloading the same cursor-server.tar.gz file on the server using wget, and it worked perfectly.

Even after placing the downloaded archive in the expected path (e.g. /root/.cursor-server/), Cursor still fails to proceed with the connection. It seems that Cursor either doesn’t recognize the preloaded file or is expecting a different handshake process.

Any help or clarification would be greatly appreciated!

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7ae568e6-9887-407c-a3ef-34ad199656e22682×446 80.1 KB

5

Hi @hxh, thank you for reporting this issue. It looks like the server downloads successfully, but has trouble starting. Could you share the output of running cat /run/user/0/cursor-remote-code.log.* on your remote machine (if these files exist)?

Could you also try removing the extensions from the remote.SSH.defaultExtensions setting? This would help with debugging to see if installing the extensions is causing Cursor to time out when opening the remote.