I've been having my (unused interactive) ssh shells closed after a timeout, on some servers. Seeing as I'm often opening tunnels with these, that's a curse.
So my first response was to run a little shell script to repeatedly sleep and produce some output ... which works OK. But then I occasionally wanted to do some interactive stuff on the server, and rather than log in again, or interrupt my script (and possibly forget to restart it) I remembered a shell timeout feature (I think originally from ksh, but definately in bash now) ... The script (called 30m :-) #!/bin/bash while : do date echo "To terminate, drop the ssh connection (return tilde dot)" TMOUT=1800 bash done The invocation from the desktop machine :- $ ssh -t _hostname_ /path/to/30m This gives me an interactive shell, that will automatically time-out, exit, and be restarted every 1800 seconds (30 minutes), thus keeping the tunnel open, avoiding the ssh timeout, and presenting me with a shell. Ths only problem would be that any shell environment I have would be lost when the shell times out ... -jim
