Free ports will save us!

Depending on the distribution running on your remote machine, you might not be able to create an Eternal Terminal session when you first run the et command.

If you encounter a Could not reach the ET server: ≤ip address≥:[port] error, this means that the remote machine doesn’t allow incoming connection on the specified port.

You can either change the configuration to use a port, which is open for use, or alternatively open a port for Eternal Terminal. How you do this will depend on the distribution and the firewall utility. For instance, Fedora users can open a port with the sudo firewall-cmd add-port=2022/tcp command. You can list all open ports with the sudo firewall-cmd --list-ports command.

If you’re using UFW however, such as on Ubuntu, you’ll have to run the sudo ufw allow ≤port number≥ command to open the specified port. You can then run the sudo ufw status verbose command to confirm that the specified port is now open.

Should you encounter any other problems with Eternal Terminal, you’ll likely find answers in issues section on the GitHub page. It’s a popular project and many common issues, such as lack of colours in the output of ls command and X11 forwarding workaround have already been addressed and closed by the developer.

QUICK TIP You can run the ‘who’ command for a list of all the users currently logged into the machine. It’ll display all the users connected whether through ssh, Eternal Terminal and so on. The ‘w’ command provides the same information, and more, but presents it differently.