In need of some help with AUTO-SSH please

[AvidPontoon]

Hello

I am using autossh on the lan turtle and have setup the config to connect to my lan turtle on port 8888 then I generated a key and copied it to my VPS. This all worked and I was able to connect upon starting autossh in that same session, but after I rebooted the lan turtle I cannot get a ssh session with it. It will give me either "connection reset by peer" and then "connection refused" or just straight up connection refusal. 

 

What am I doing wrong? This has been driving me insane. There is no firewall on the vps blocking the outbound connection either.

[Thecolorchanges]

On the turtle, can you ssh to the host without typing in a password?
On the host that the turtle is sshing into, "netstat -nap | more" look and see if port 8888 is open.

[AvidPontoon]

1 hour ago, Thecolorchanges said:

On the turtle, can you ssh to the host without typing in a password?
On the host that the turtle is sshing into, "netstat -nap | more" look and see if port 8888 is open.

The port shows up and yes I can ssh into the host, it had just worked a handful of times but now I'm getting the same "connection refused" error as before :/