Comments on: Keeping ssh connections alive

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:11:44 +0000

Awesome! Thanks, this worked like a charm. It was really starting to bug me that it would time-out every hour and wouldn’t leave me connected.

Great fix!

By: Stuart Colville

Stuart Colville — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:49:02 +0000

@Gary: Hey, no need to apologise

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 19:49:17 +0000

Yeah, I was meaning in the sense that I normally hop through from one server to an internal server via ssh, so i’ll use the ServerAliveInterval to stop that connection dropping out.

Apologies for the confusion

I think I’ll be having a good read of man ssh

By: Stuart Colville

Stuart Colville — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 20:26:59 +0000

@Dave: I’ve updated the line regarding the config file so that it’s less ambiguous. If you don’t have a file called ‘config’ in the .ssh directory you will need to create it first. Running:

vim config

Will create a new file ready for editing. The same is true for other command line text editors such as nano/pico too.

@Gary:

A good tip for the server side though, one to chalk down for later !

Actually this isn’t for the server. This configuration is to make the ssh command you use locally keep alive your connection. This way is better than a server-side configuration as not everyone will have access to the server’s ssh configuration.

The sending of null packets that putty has sounds like the same thing for putty users. Well spotted.

By: Gary

Gary — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 19:31:12 +0000

Also, if you happen to use the excellent Putty as your ssh client, it has a ‘Sending of null packets’ option in the Connection settings to help keep the connection alive.

A good tip for the server side though, one to chalk down for later !

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:37:30 +0000

What’s the “config file”

I don’t seem to have one:
————————
host:~/.ssh dave$ ls -a ~/.ssh
authorized_keys
id_rsa.pub
local.key
id_rsa
known_hosts

By: Stuart Colville

Stuart Colville — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 14:53:15 +0000

@Tim: Thanks for keeping the flame burning for PC toting readers :-).

@Xaprb: Good point, that’s one of the biggest benefits with screen and why everyone should check it out. For anyone new to screen there’s a great overview here: Gnu Screen.

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 14:39:04 +0000

My favorite thing to do is start a GNU Screen session once I’m connected to the remote machine. If the connection goes down, no worries. The screen session is still there. I can re-connect and re-attach to the session. Screen has become indispensable for my daily work, for this and dozens of other reasons (leave a long-running job at work, then re-connect and check on it from home, etc etc).

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 14:15:16 +0000

Of course, if you’re using SSH for SFTP, you could also depend apon your client software.

WinSCP has a rather handy “Remember last used directory” checkbox in it’s session settings dialogs!

Not sure if that’s really relevant here, but it’s saved me some headaches in the past!