I have two laptops, say A and B. I have an SSD, an external disk, with a perfectly working Debian 13 installed and connected to a USB input of laptop B. Laptop B is connected via Wi-Fi to an ADSL Modem-Router; Laptop A is also connected to this router using two “Live Plugs”: Router > Ethernet connection > powerline connections > Ethernet connection> Laptop A.
For the past few days, every time I try to connect to this SSD via SSH, I have to open a local terminal and run any valid command on it. If I don’t do this, especially if the command I’m running on the local terminal is invalid, “command not found”, the connection fails with the error “no route to host.”
Once I’ve done this, I can close the SSH connection and reopen it as needed: no further issues untill I either reboot this SSD or wake it up from sleep after a suspend action (“suspend on lid close”).
If this helps, once the SSH connection was established, I ran the following commands from a terminal on the SSD:
~$ ss -tunlp
Netid State Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address:Port Peer Address:Port Process
.........
tcp LISTEN 0 128 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:*
tcp LISTEN 0 4096 [::1]:631 [::]:*
tcp LISTEN 0 128 [::]:22 [::]:*
~$ systemctl status systemd-networkd
○ systemd-networkd.service - Network Configuration
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-networkd.service; disabled; preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
.........
~$ systemctl status NetworkManager
● NetworkManager.service - Network Manager
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/NetworkManager.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2026-05-12 01:07:38 EDT; 2h 3min ago
........
Do you have any idea what’s going on?
PS: Actually, it’s a little more complicated than I thought. After a few more attempts, including shutting down and restarting the system, the SSH connection seemed to be working again, but then, after a few more tries, it started acting up again. So it’s a
random issue. That doesn’t make things any easier.
