I recently found rmate is no longer working on a remote server, and I thought it might be because of a cross-talk with Jupyter Lab another user is using (on his account, just to be clear. We are not sharing the same account). For instance, when doing “sudo lsof -i tcp:52698” and then killing PIDs that appear from it by “sudo kill -9 [PID]”, his Jupyter Lab process got shut down.
Now, I wasn’t totally sure whether rmate is not working because of the potential cross-talk, but I decided to change the default port number for rmate, 52698 to see if it solves the problem. I first followed jsmedmar’s suggestion in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35343853/how-to-use-sublime-text-over-ssh-with-multiple-computers-in-same-server-using-rs, but it didn’t work. And then, I followed the suggestion in “Port Forwarding” section of https://macromates.com/blog/2011/mate-and-rmate/ (with RMATE_PORT=52699 instead of 12345 to be consistent with jsmedmar’s suggestion above, but I guess this is not an important detail), but it still didn’t work. So, changed all the files I modified back to their original configurations, which are: Packages/User/rsub.sublime-settings (used in the first suggestion; since this file didn’t exist before I deleted it), ~/.ssh/config(used in both the first and second suggestions), ~/.bashrc (used in the second suggestion) in my local computer, and ~/.bash_profile (used in the first suggestion), /etc/ssh/sshd_config (used in the second suggestion) in the server. But, still I got the following error message:
/usr/local/bin/rmate: connect: Connection refused
usr/local/bin/rmate: line 412: /dev/tcp/[my IP address xx.xx.xx.xxx]/52699: Connection refused
Unable to connect to TextMate on [my IP address xx.xx.xx.xxx]:52699
In particular, I don’t understand why the port number in that error message is still 52699. I tried both “-R 52698:localhost:52698” in the ssh command and adding “RemoteForward 52698 localhost:52698” in ~/.ssh/config, but whatever I do, the port number in the error message was still 52699. Also, I remember when I got a similar error message before I tried the two suggestions above, I got “localhost” in place of [my IP address xx.xx.xx.xxx] in the error message (although I am not totally sure).
I’ve reinstalled rmate but I still get the exact same error message. My guess is that while trying the first and second suggestions above, I changed RMATE_HOST and RMATE_PORT environment variables explicitly on the server side and this might have made some permanent changes to them. But, at least when I echo those variables they did not return anything. Another guess is that creating a file called “sub.sublime-settings” in Packages/User directory of the local Sublime Text (as suggested by the first suggestion) might have had some affect, but this might be unlikely since when I use a different local computer to try rmate on the remote server, I get the exact same error message.
I looked into /usr/local/bin/rmate file, but I am not familiar with the shell script, and I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong. At least I could see that the error message I got depends on “$host” and “$port” variables and something must have gone wrong with them.
In any case, if you could give any suggestions to solve this issue and allow me to use rmate again, I would really appreciate that!