I have an Ubuntu server and a Windows desktop running behind a Centos firewall/router.

Lately, I've noticed that when I SSH into the Ubuntu server from my Windows box via Putty, it keeps disconnecting after a while. I've tried keep_alive setting for Putty, but to no avail. Putty will just randomly disconnect with a "Software caused connection abort" message.

So I did some digging around. First I logged into the SSH via lo i.e. 127.0.0.1, and left it on for a while. That works fine, so it tells me that SSHd is not the issue, somehow the network is messing up somewhere.

So I dug up in the logs, and here's what I saw in the /var/log/auth.log:

Oct 3 14:08:14 athena sshd[2379]: Server listening on :: port 22.
Oct 3 14:10:19 athena sshd[3017]: Accepted password for amin from 192.168.1.101 port 1925 ssh2
Oct 3 14:10:19 athena sshd[3017]: pam_unix(sshd:session): session opened for user chronos by (uid=0)
Oct 3 14:24:59 athena dbus-daemon: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type ="method_call", sender=":1.35" (uid=1000 pid=4033 comm="/usr/lib/indicator-applet/indicator-applet --oaf-a") interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties" member="Get" error name="(unset)" requested_reply=0 destination=":1.18" (uid=0 pid=3017 comm="sshd: chronos [priv] "))


The last line seem to be the one causing the connection drop. Any ideas as to what it means?

The same error could be seen if there is any network problem exist or if sshd service stops automatically.. Best way to solve this problem is isolate the network vs. daemon issue.I think, better way of identifying the n/w issue is ping the server continously.

Did Google or Google Linux (http://google.com/linux) on the error msg. or a portion of it? That often yields good results. (... & sometimes disappointing ones.)