On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 02:20:08PM +1000, Tony Crouch wrote:
> Hi Tim,
> Yeah, I don't really understand it either. I have asked my uni to look
> into it (several months back ... probably October last year), but have
> not as yet received a reply.
>
> One of the system admins did mention to my in passing he was
> experiencing the same problem when connecting from home, not directly
> connecting at the uni. So I was hazard a guess its something to do with
> their firewall or something.
>
> A friend of mine suggestions writing a script which, on logging in to
> the remote machines, automatically performs a task (i.e. display a list
> of people logged in and write this to a file which is continually
> overwritten as so that the file does not impinge greatly on my quota)
> every 5 minutes as to keep the connection alive.
>
> Would anyone be able to offer some hints / suggestions as to how this
> may be done? I have had a go myself, but (as usual) failed miserably.
>
I have this issue/problem when connecting out from our work machines
using ssh. I don't think it's anything to do with ssh either client
or server end, I'm pretty sure it's the firewall.
What I do to prevent diconnections is to have a background process on
the server/remote system that echoes a NUL character to the terminal
window every 5 minutes or so. This doesn't affect the use of the
terminal window at all and keeps my connections up and running for the
whole day.
At the end of my .profile I have:-
#
#
# Run ka (keep alive) if this is a remote ssh login
#
if [ "$SSH_CLIENT" ]
then ka&
fi
In my case ka is a C program that echoes NUL every five minutes but a
shell script that does this would do as well.
--
Chris Green
