Login Screen

Sounds like you're connecting to LISH, the emergency console. Lish puts you in a screen session, so ctrl-A then "d" will detach it and put you back at the lish prompt. From there, you can "exit" (or "help", or "cake").

For day-to-day stuff, you probably want to ssh to your linode directly. That will do the right thing when you log out :-)

So do I just want to do ssh @.linode.com, rather than

ssh linode@.linode.com ?

Oh wait, I got it. I want to ssh to the public ip. I'm dumb.

Don't fret… at least you now know what to do if you need to log in via the console. :-)