Connecting Cursor to Offline HPC Compute Nodes via User-Space SSHD
Background
Connecting modern IDEs like Cursor to HPC compute nodes can be highly frustrating. Many SLURM clusters enforce strict security policies: they block inbound internet access, disable outbound internet on compute nodes (breaking tools like Ngrok or Pinggy), and restrict standard SSH access via GSSAPI (Kerberos) or PAM, effectively disabling standard SSH key authentication.
To bypass these restrictions without root privileges, we can run a User-Space SSH Daemon (SSHD) directly on the compute node. By binding it to a high port (e.g., 22222) and running it under your own user account, it bypasses system-level Kerberos/PAM restrictions and allows seamless connections via your local SSH keys.
