Please help...I was wondering how do you get ssh to timeout and close connection after 20 minutes of inactivity. I am hoping to...stop those users from leaving a ssh session open while they are not using it... I am using suse pro and bash.

Also, if you can help, what is the best way to increase the cipher to aes256?

Thanks in advance for your help.

From the sshd_config manpage

ClientAliveInterval
Sets a timeout interval in seconds after which if no data has
been received from the client, sshd will send a message through
the encrypted channel to request a response from the client.
The default is 0, indicating that these messages will not be
sent to the client. This option applies to protocol version 2
only.


In your sshd config, add the line

ClientAliveInterval 1200 #in seconds
Protocol 2 #Doesn't work on protocol 1

Then restart sshd and you are off and running.

For the AES,

once again in sshd_config (normally in /etc/ssh)

Add this line
CIPHERS aes256-cbc #you can add more options here, see man sshd_config for more


Restart sshd and again, everything is good

thanks for your help!