[SOLVED] SSH timeout error on Azure DevOps CD pipeline

Issue

I am getting an timeout error when trying to deploy to an VM instance hosted on AWS. Manually I can log ing using

ssh -i myKeyFile.pem myuser@IP

Once I accessed the remote machine I can execute some docker commands and everything works fine. But now that I need to automated that on the CD pipeline is where I am getting the following error:

2020-06-02T21:37:12.6877276Z Trying to establish an SSH connection to ***@IP:port
2020-06-02T21:38:52.4629461Z ##[error]Failed to connect to remote machine. Verify the SSH service connection details. Error: Error: Timed out while waiting for handshake.
2020-06-02T21:38:52.4685976Z ##[section]Finishing: Run shell commands on remote machine

The steps I follow to make the SSH connection are:

1. I created a SSH service connection on the project settings in Azure DevOps
2. I created the CD pipeline
3. I added a SSH task with the following parameters

When I manually trigger it to test if it works, the release start working fine but after 1:43 minutes more or less is when I got the error:

Then, when I review the logs, it is the same error I pasted at the beginning:

[error]Failed to connect to remote machine. Verify the SSH service connection details. Error: Error: Timed out while waiting for handshake

I've increase the handshake timeout settings from the default one (20000) to 90000, but no luck.

Any one has face this problem before?

Solution

Seems there is an ongoing error with the default agent pools from Azure DevOps. Lot of people have been reported this and Azure DevOps teams is working on it at the time this post is been written (I couldn't find the post where all that is details. I will add this later on).

The workaround is

1. To create a self-hosted agent.
2. After this has been created you will need to re-create your CD pipeline using the new self-hosted agent.
3. The rest of the SSH task configuration depends on your needs. But if you want to test the SSH connection works, just print something:

echo 'I'm connected'

4. After this you CD pipeline should be working fine.

More details on how to created the Self-Hosted Agent on Windows. There are also links for Linux and Mac.

Answered By - MikePR