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Yilin Fang

Fixing Cursor Remote SSH Error: WebSocket Close with Status Code 1006

·343 words·2 mins
English Cursor Tools SSH Notes
Yilin Fang
Author
Yilin Fang
PhD Student @ OSU CSE
Table of Contents

I enjoy using Cursor and perform a lot of my development via SSH on remote servers. However, after I updated Cursor to Version 2.4.21, I could not access my servers anymore.

I got the following error:

Failed to connect to the remote extension host server (Error: WebSocket close with status code 1006)

The Investigation
#

To find out what was happening under the hood, I performed the following two checks to find the potential cause.

First, I tested my standard SSH connection in the terminal. I found that I could access the servers via bare SSH without any issues. This confirmed that the network connection and SSH configuration were working correctly.

Second, I attempted to use Cursor to connect to my backup servers. These were machines I had never connected to with Cursor before. Surprisingly, the connection worked perfectly.

The Cause Analysis
#

This weird behavior helped me narrow down the potential cause of the connection error. Since the updated Cursor client (Version 2.4.21) worked fine with “fresh” servers but failed with previous connections, it is likely the problem lay on the server side.

I suspected that the previous version of Cursor had some server-side processes running that were not compatible with the new version. This mismatch or corruption led to the connection error.

The Solution
#

To fix this, I applied the following steps:

  1. Remove the existing Cursor server-side files:
rm -rf ~/.cursor-server
  1. Kill the hanging Cursor processes:
ps aux | grep cursor
kill -9 <process-id>
  1. Restart Cursor and try to connect to the server again.

Personal Rant
#

I really enjoy Cursor, not only for the agentic programming but also for the fantastic Cursor Tab feature. However, this incident really frustrates me. Compared to other competitors like Windsurf, Antigravity, or Trae, Cursor has more “Quality of Life” (QoL) bugs like this.

From a very personal perspective, I think Cursor is the best AI-powered editor out there at the time of writing (Jan 2026), but I still hope the development team would pay more attention to such QoL issues in the future.