You should turn off any key agents during testing. The 'force_password' attribute will turn off public key authentication. This will only work if the remote SSH server is configured to allow password logins. Example of using 'force_password' attribute:: s = pxssh.pxssh() s.force_password = True hostname = raw_input('hostname: ') username = raw_input('username: ') password = getpass.getpass('password: ') s.login (hostname, username, password) `debug_command_string` is only for the test suite to confirm that the string generated for SSH is correct, using this will not allow you to do anything other than get a string back from `pxssh.pxssh.login()`. é