ssh problem

[Chris Green]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 05:49:17PM -0700, rikona wrote:
> ssh stops working. I initiate the ssh contact in terminal; connects
> reliably. I can ^C to stop it OK. I sometimes get a "broken pipe"
> message, but can reconnect easily from the CLI.
> 
> The problem is sometimes [more often than not] ssh just quits working
> - no message in terminal, and ^C will NOT do anything. Terminal is not
> responding to keyboard input. If I close the terminal window it warns
> me that something is still running and it will stop if I close
> terminal. I usually just close the window and start ssh again in a new
> terminal window.
> 
> What might be happening to ssh? What is the best way to diagnose this?
> Best of all, is there a way to keep this from happening? It has become
> a PITA. Before the last few updates, I do not recall this happening. I
> run 10.04, updated.
> 
It sounds a bit like there's some sort of timeout in the connection.  I
used to suffer from this when I used ssh to connect through the firewall
at work (with permission!).  The firewall would drop the connection
after several minutes of inactivity.  Setting any/all of the keepalive
settings in ssh didn't help, I finally resorted to a background script
started from .profile which sent a NUL character every few minutes.

The symptoms of the firewall dropping the connection were exactly as you
describe, connection stops working but no error message or other
symptoms, just silence.

-- 
Chris Green