remote-experiment-preflight

Remote Experiment Preflight

Boundary

This is the Research Assistant's narrow infrastructure exception. Configure and test one SSH server, inspect its compute, and establish a user-authorized mount. Do not write experiment code, install experiment dependencies, launch trials, or interpret results.

The first version supports exactly one server per project through easyresearch.ssh. Do not create profile names, a server list, selection logic, or compatibility fields for future multi-server support.

Required Values

Derive these from the conversation or ask one focused question for missing values:

• host or IP address;
• port;
• username;
• expected SSH host fingerprint in OpenSSH SHA256:<base64> form, obtained from the server owner or another trusted channel;
• authentication type: password or private-key;
• absolute credential-file path outside the paper project;
• optional absolute passphrase-file path for an encrypted private key;
• paper or project name, unless the user supplied an absolute POSIX remote project path;
• expected compute class and mount authority.

The credential file is user-managed. For password, its first line is the password. For private-key, it contains the OpenSSH private key. File contents must never be read with Agent-visible tools, copied into chat, written to settings/artifacts, or included in diagnostics. Only paths may enter the conversation and project settings.

Workspace Mapping

The local SSH experiment root is always the absolute <exact-cwd>/experiment_ssh/. Do not ask the user to choose another local path and do not mount an SSH workspace over local-only experiments/.

Select the remote project root in this order:

1. Use an absolute POSIX path when the user explicitly supplied one.
2. Otherwise derive a short project name from the approved paper title, project name, existing project artifacts, or exact-cwd basename, in that order.
3. Convert that name to one lowercase conservative ASCII slug: translate a non-ASCII title to a concise meaningful English name when needed, replace each run outside a-z, 0-9, ., _, and - with one -, collapse repeated -, and trim punctuation from both ends. If no non-empty meaningful slug remains, ask for the project name, not a server path.
4. Configure the home-relative remote root as <slug>/, which means $HOME/<slug>/ for creation, commands, and SSHFS.