SSH connection closed/dropped a few seconds after successful login

Don't use a password. Generate a passphrase-less SSH key and push it to your VM.

If you already have an SSH key, you can skip this step… Just hit Enter for the key and both passphrases:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Copy your keys to the target server:

$ ssh-copy-id id@server
id@server's password:

Now try logging into the machine, with ssh 'id@server', and check-in:

.ssh/authorized_keys

Note: If you don't have .ssh dir and authorized_keys file, you need to create it first

to make sure we haven’t added extra keys that you weren’t expecting.

Finally, check to log in…

$ ssh id@server

id@server:~$

You may also want to look into using ssh-agent if you want to try keeping your keys protected with a passphrase.

I experienced the same issue, though it was not an ssh issue - when logging on locally to the machine the same thing occurred: successful logon with the 'last logon' message displayed, and then a blinking cursor but no prompt/activity. Through trial and error I was able to resolve the same problem as follows:

1. Log on as root (another user with sudo privileges should also work, so long as it is not the user experiencing the problem)
2. Go to the users home directory # /home/user/
3. Look for a symbolic link file with .LOCKED appended to it. In my case this link pointed to a pid which didn't exist. Delete this link.
4. Log out

After doing this both my local and ssh logins resulted in prompt being displayed correctly. As a side note I'm using zsh as my shell. I can't say if this will work for other shells but I suspect that it would.