Support for Remote SSH in Air-Gapped/Offline Environments

Bug Reports
1

Hello Cursor Team,

First, thank you for creating such a powerful and innovative tool. I’ve been using it extensively and it has significantly improved my workflow.

I am writing to report an issue and request an enhancement for the Cursor Remote-SSH extension (anysphere.remote-ssh-1.0.8) when connecting to servers in an air-gapped or offline network environment.

The Problem

I am trying to connect to a remote Windows server that is on a secured internal network with no external internet access.

To be clear, this issue is specific to the Cursor extension. I can connect to the very same server without any problems using the standard Remote - SSH extension provided by VS Code. The VS Code extension works because it correctly detects the manually pre-installed server on the remote machine and does not try to force a new download.

In contrast, the Cursor Remote-SSH extension fails to connect. From my analysis of the connection logs, the issue stems from the installation script that runs on the remote server:

Deletes Existing Installation: It forcefully removes the entire server directory (C:\Users\InnoQAS_ARG.cursor-server\bin) at the beginning of every connection attempt.
Attempts to Download: It then tries to download the remote server package (vscode-reh-win32-x64.tar.gz) from a public URL (https://cursor.blob.core.windows.net/…).
Because my remote server has no internet access, the download times out, and the connection fails. My attempts to manually place the server files in the directory are useless, as the script wipes them clean every time I try to connect.

Proposed Solution / Feature Request

Could the installation script be modified to support offline environments, similar to how the standard VS Code extension handles it?

Log Details for Reference

Below is the log output from a failed connection attempt. It shows the script removing existing installations and then failing with a timeout during the download phase.

2025-06-09 17:57:10.178 [info] (ssh_tunnel) stdout: >> if ($true) {

Write-Host “Removing all existing Cursor installations”
Remove-Item -Path “$SERVER_DATA_DIR/bin” -Recurse -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Remove-Item -Path “$SERVER_DATA_DIR/.log" -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Remove-Item -Path "$SERVER_DATA_DIR/.token” -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Remove-Item -Path “$SERVER_DATA_DIR/.installation_lock” -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
}

Removing all existing Cursor installations

…

2025-06-09 17:57:10.406 [info] (ssh_tunnel) stdout: Downloading server from https://cursor.blob.core.windows.net/remote-releases/53b99ce608cba35127ae3a050c1738a959750860/vscode-reh-win32-x64.tar.gz

…

2025-06-09 17:57:30.473 [info] (ssh_tunnel) stderr: Invoke-RestMethod : The operation has timed out.
위치 줄:20 문자:1

  • Invoke-RestMethod @REQUEST_ARGUMENTS
  •   + CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (System.Net.HttpWebRequest:HttpWebRequest) [Invoke-RestMethod], WebExc 
 eption
  + FullyQualifiedErrorId : WebCmdletWebResponseException,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.InvokeRestMethodCommand

…

2025-06-09 17:57:30.491 [error] Error installing server: Couldn’t install Cursor Server, install script returned non-zero exit status: Error server log file not found C:\Users\InnoQAS_ARG.cursor-server.53b99ce608cba35127ae3a050c1738a959750860.log
2025-06-09 17:57:30.564 [info] (ssh_tunnel): exit: code=1 signal=null

3

Hi @df-korea, thank you for this bug report. Could you try upgrading to version 1.0.9 of Anysphere Remote SSH? This version fixes an issue when connecting to airgapped window remote hosts. Please share if you continue to run into issues with the connection.

4

Hi @ravirahman

Thanks for the quick response.

I’ve updated to Anysphere Remote SSH version 1.0.9 as you suggested and tested the connection. Unfortunately, the same bug is still occurring.

Here are the specific issues I’m facing with my airgapped remote host:

  1. When I try to connect via SSH to the host on my internal network, it attempts to install vscode-reh-win32-x64.tar.gz and fails (as expected, since there is no internet connection).
  2. As a workaround, I manually downloaded vscode-reh-win32-x64.tar.gz and placed it on the remote host. However, the file gets automatically deleted as soon as I initiate the SSH connection.

The standard Remote - SSH extension in VS Code works perfectly fine in this same environment.

Is there a way to resolve this? As a suggestion, would it be possible to bring back the feature from the 0.4x versions that allowed us to use VS Code’s own SSH implementation?

I would appreciate it if you could look into this or suggest any alternative solutions.

Thank you.

P.S. Just to be clear, our internal network is completely airgapped and has no access to external networks.