Potential causes

  • You did not purchase "remote build port (SSH)" addon during your checkout. Since the remote build port is required for remote build, you will not be able to connect without this addon. To resolve this issue, simply log in to your portal account at portal.macincloud.com and add this addon to your existing server plan


  • Your firewall is blocking port 22. Port 22 is required for remote build with Visual Studio and Xamarin. Please check your local office or home firewall (including, but not limited to your main router, your local computer's software firewall and antivirus) and make sure port 22 is not being blocked.


  • Visual Studio for Mac (or Xamarin Studio) is not running on the remote Mac. You need to run Visual Studio for Mac on the Mac side for the remote build connection to work.


  • Your local Visual Studio has not been updated to the latest available version. Make sure you check your Visual Studio update and apply all available updates to ensure your local Visual Studio version matches the required version to run remote build.


If you are not able to resolve this issue on your own, please contact our support staff.




Ensure you have the correct add-on for your plan


During the checkout process it is important to have selected the Enable Remote Build Port (SSH) add-on


If you missed this part you can enable the add-on yourself by using our user portal. Please create a new account using the same email you used to purchase your subscription. 


Once you have created an account please do the following:


  • Select your user profile in the top right corner 


  • In the drop-down menu select My Subscriptions


  • You will see a list of your current active subscriptions, please select the EDIT button on the subscription you wish to update


  • Select YES on the Enable Remote Build Port (SSH) option


  • Click UPDATE


This will enable the Remote Login for your user on the server.


If you have any problems please contact our support staff to have this feature enabled on your server.



Troubleshooting if you already have the add-on


If you have this feature enabled and the issue persists please check the following:


  • Your firewall is off or not blocking port 22


  • You entered the IP address correctly and not the server name (the IP address is found in the email with your server credentials)


  • You are entering the right credentials


During the first time you are connecting Visual Studio to the Xamarin Mac Agent you will need to login to the server and open Xamarin Studio and at the same time try to connect to the Xamarin Mac Agent from your  Visual Studio Project.




Getting an "Unable to connect to Address='x.x.x.x' with User='xxxx'" error


Xamarin 4.1 security feature – This error will happen if you downgrade to Xamarin 4.0 after using Xamarin 4.1 or higher. In this case the error will be accompanied by the additional warning "Private key is encrypted but passphrase is empty". This is an intentional change due to a new security feature in Xamarin 4.1. 


To fix this, try delete id_rsa andid_rsa.pub from %LOCALAPPDATA%\Xamarin\MonoTouch, and then reconnect to the Mac build host. 


Source: Connection Troubleshooting for a Xamarin.iOS Build Host