termdeck
Any engine fix: The machine drops and reconnects over and over
A long-lived WebSocket does not stay up forever, and the redial that follows is usually nothing at all. The interesting case is a machine that cannot stay up for a minute.
Another agent is already connected to Termdeck with this machine
Printed by Termdeck.
Diagnosis
A proxy in front of the service closes tunneled WebSockets periodically and says so in the close code. The agent redials in about a second and nothing is lost. A handful of these a day is the system working rather than failing.
A second agent that keeps retrying produces a regular rhythm rather than the random spacing of an edge recycle: connect, refusal, wait, repeat, on a timer. The tell is how even the interval is.
A reply larger than the frame ceiling errors on the receiving side and takes the connection with it. What made this so hard to spot is that the next dial-in re-read the same file and hit the same wall: one machine in production flapped for about seven hours on a single fat transcript before the read path was chunked to fit.
Check
| Run this | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|
grep -c "Connection problem" ~/.termdeck/logs/agent.log | A count rather than a read. Dozens in an hour is a flap; a handful in a day is the edge doing its job. |
grep -i "already connected" ~/.termdeck/logs/agent.log | Finds a token conflict directly. That line names both the cause and the fix. |
Every command here has been run on a real machine. Termdeck answers the same questions for every machine you have connected, without opening a terminal on any of them.
Fix
It is self-healing and costs nothing. A turn in flight survives a gap of a few minutes on its own.
One machine, one token. The second is usually an install command pasted on another computer, or a copy started by hand on this one.
The read path behind the frame problem is capped on the service side, so old agents are already healed. An agent that is old for other reasons is still worth updating.
Not this
Every restart is another dial. Where two agents are fighting over one token, restarting either of them is how the fight continues.
FAQ
No. Proxies recycle long-lived connections deliberately, and the agent is built to redial in about a second.
Not to a short gap. A running turn parks on the machine and rebinds when the link returns.
No. Add the second computer in the dashboard and install it with the token that account hands you.
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