> I was just seing this as a repetition of what we had atop.

That was a typo and removed. look at https://github.com/mozilla-services/loads/blob/deps/Makefile#L36

> We probably should pass these tests all the time and make sure they're not skipped, so I was thinking about not making a special case for this test.

This is another problem. We'd need a paramiko local ssh server. I started ot dig on this but this will be for later. and it will never run on travis.

> What's the rationale behind the isolation of these tests?

We need to run a ssh server. See my previous comment