ssh session timing out

[Kipton Moravec]

I have a weird situation that I do not understand.

I have a computer running a custom java program that echos certain data
to a port. The computer is located about 7 miles away in a not easily
accessible location. It is running Xubuntu and is a 450 MHz computer
with 384 MB RAM.

On my home Ubuntu computer I open a terminal window, ssh to the remote
computer and log in. Then I "telnet localhost 14508" to see the echo of
the data I am interested in. It spits out a line from once in 3 seconds
to once in 30 minutes.

This works great on my main Ubuntu 8.04 computer with 2.4 GHz processor
and 1.5 GB RAM running.  It will monitor the data for days.

However, when I use an old 450 MHz Pentium computer with 256MB running
Ubuntu 8.04 it works for an hour or two, then it says:

"Read from Remote host ... Connection reset from peer  
Connection to ... closed"

and it drops the ssh session.

I have another old similarly configured computer at home that has the
same problem.

What is happening? How do I fix it?

I am guessing the old computer is taking too long to respond to some
type of handshaking and it drops the connection. If that is the case is
there a parameter I can set to make the timeout a little longer?

Kip


-- 
Kipton Moravec AE5IB .- . ..... .. -...

"Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
--Mark Twain