BeagleBone Black SSH connection not available

Hi all!

I recently acquired a BeagleBone Black which has been installed in a VPN. Following the getting-started steps, I got problems during the SSH connection via Ethernet: once installed and powered on, first access after reboot must be physically through the USB (which creates an ethernet interface to access via SSH from host). If it is from the VPN (thus through the Ethernet port), then it returns “kex_exchange_identification”. It is imperative that the first access to the BBB is via USB, otherwise it will not work. After that first access, the problem disappears and SSH (from wherever) works fine.

Does anyone know the reason of that first USB access after reboot?

Regards,
Oscar

Not clear on what you are doing, however if you have a VPN client running on the board my fingers would point in that direction.
Also, what image are you running?

With “installed in a VPN” I mean that the BBB takes part of an internal network (LAN) which is accessible through a VPN. This VPN allows the remote access to the devices connected to that network. So, on my host PC I remotely run the VPN client and have available the SSH to any of those devices.

The BBB has the default image running, I guess that corresponds to AM3358 Debian 10.3 2020-04-06 4GB SD IoT. The only changes that I made are: installing Python and Arduino and set a static IP.

If you have VMware workstation or virtualbox set up a fresh “host” for development and leave out the VPN client. Try that it and all connections should work fine.

Typically it is better to use DHCP and add your target’s hostname and IP to the host file of your build box ( in VM or native).

Then you can ssh

$ ssh <hostname of target>

or if you have different user names on both target and host

$ ssh <username>@<hostname of target>