SSH: Tips And Tricks You Need

SSH is one of the most widely used protocols for connecting to remote shells. While there are numerous SSH clients the most-used still remains OpenSSH’s ssh. There is a plethora of tips and tricks that can be used to make your experience even better than it already is. Read on to discover some of the best tweaks to your favorite SSH client.

Adding A Keep-Alive

A keep-alive is a small piece of data transmitted between a client and a server to ensure that the connection is still open or to keep the connection open. Many protocols implement this as a way of cleaning up dead connections to the server. If a client does not respond, the connection is closed.

SSH does not enable this by default. There are pros and cons to this. A major pro is that under a lot of conditions if you disconnect from the Internet, your connection will be usable when you reconnect. For those who drop out of WiFi a lot, this is a major plus when you discover you don’t need to login again.

For those who get the following message from their SSH client when they stop typing for a few minutes it’s not as convenient:

symkat@symkat:~$ Read from remote host symkat.com: Connection reset by peer
Connection to symkat.com closed.

This happens because your router or firewall is trying to clean up dead connections. It’s seeing that no data has been transmitted in N seconds and falsely assumes that the connection is no longer in use.

To rectify this you can add a Keep-Alive. This will ensure that your connection stays open to the server and the firewall doesn’t close it. To make all connections from your shell send a keepalive add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file:

KeepAlive yes
ServerAliveInterval 60

The con is that if your connection drops and a KeepAlive packet is sent SSH will disconnect you. If that becomes a problem, you can always actually fix the Internet connection.

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Tags: hotspot, linux, Open Source, openssh, pipes, proxy, security, ssh, tar, unix, wifi