Emacs-Tramp: Not working properly

Question

I'm trying to use Tramp/Emacs-23 in Ubuntu 12.04 in order to edit the remote host files. My remote host has two step authentication (RSA+Passwd). I use multiplexing through .ssh/config to ensure that tramp can directly connect to the remote shell without having to provide passwords.

My problem however is that I have 3 different remote hosts. When I try to connect to remote host through tramp without the initial multiplexing (through terminal), the TRAMP hangs with a message stating "Tramp: Waiting for prompts from remote shell". I used the below mentioned commands in .ssh/config to ensure the connection gets lost after a specified interval upon no prompt.

Host *
ServerAliveCountMax=30
ServerAliveInterval=5

However this doesn't seem to have any effect on the tramp connection. It will be of help if someone can help me in fixing this issue.

Answer 1

Sorry that your question has been left hanging so long.

I can offer a couple of things to try, use the tramp protocol sshx instead of ssh, it seems to cope better with most non-vanilla ssh connections.

e.g.

/sshx:user@host:path/filename

The other thing to try is adding your ssh key passphrase to the session at startup, run an ssh-agent on the machine, and connect to it at startup, then run ssh-add to enter the passphrase once.

As a side note, upgrade your Emacs to 24.3 there's a lot of new/great stuff in there since 23.x