Hi there

I am experiencing some behaviour which I suspect is due to my wireless link.

I have the habit of leaving open several ssh sessions and switching back and forth to them as and when required.

At the office, which uses cable, this seems to work: connections stay alive as long as I want.

At home, however, the connections "freeze" when not being used for a set amount of time. Wait some more, and the shell exists with status code 255

For the record: ssh connections that are currently transfering data or receiving data (and outputting it on the console), keep alive for as long as that flow is going on + the set time, as mentioned before.


If I press a key inside the ssh session every minute, then the connection keeps alive too.

Anybody know how to remedy this?


Thanks

Probably a firewall that kills the non active connections to prevent DoS.

The ssh timeout has to be less than the firewall timeout.

Please be aware that this does not happen on the connections made on the cable connection.

That said, what firewall are we talking about?

Our corporate firewall kills idle SSH connections after a period of time. Using putty, you can set it to send null packets periodically to keep your session active (I use 15 seconds here). Have a look at the Connection options in your putty client.

If your client is Linux, not Windows, I think the option to set is ServerAliveInterval. This can be set globally in /etc/ssh/ssh_config, or per user in ~/.ssh/config

Thank you all for your input