Comments on: Keeping your SSH sessions alive with NOOP

By: jeff

jeff — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:53:01 +0000

I’m not familiar with how this is supposed to work.
Do you run this script in the backround, and continue using the ssh window (I’m using secureCRT)?
If so, why do you have to print characters to the screen – can’t you redirect it /dev/null so it doesn’t show up?

Also is the SIGINT caught when you close the window, or when the server tries to close the connection?

Lastly, why do yoave to sleep for a random time?

Thanks,
Jeff

By: danny

danny — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:44:33 +0000

Cool tip man, i’ll link to your article later today.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:16:46 +0000

Hmm – I always used:

ping -i 300 -s 1 yahoo.com

As you mention though, that’s rather ugly when you’re working in the same shell. I only us it when the sole purpose of my ssh connection is to set up a tunnel for other ports.

By: MERLiiN

MERLiiN — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:45:52 +0000

Craptastic.. your blog accepted my slashes so \\” became “. Probably because you use PHP. Hopefully you can edit the post for me.

By: MERLiiN

MERLiiN — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:43:41 +0000

Although David’s suggestion is the best practice…

I would probably spawn something like this in the background from my .bashrc file:

#!/bin/sh
X=0
while :
do
echo -n “33]0;CONNECTED FOR $X SECONDS07″
sleep 1
done

That should only update your window title and not print anything to your screen. The actual echo string would depend on your shell and terminal. See http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Xterm-Title.html for further details.

By: D

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:48:51 +0000

i just use top to keep my sessions alive, plus i can keep an eye on what’s going on at a glance as well.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:08:47 +0000

@pb,

Thats a huge improvement over the while true uptime loop. However, my noop script will not fill your terminal with crap. When you CTRL-C the script, all output disappears.

Brock

By: pb

pb — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:09:26 +0000

What about just “watch -n99 uptime”? That seems to work well for me…

By: admin

admin — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:41:39 +0000

David,

That is a great resource. Thanks for sharing!

I am going to give those ssh and putty options a go.

Brock

By: David

David — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:20:34 +0000

A better solution is to correctly configure your “TCPKeepAlive” and “ServerAliveInterval” options for your particular SSH connection, see:
http://drupal.star.bnl.gov/STAR/comp/sofi/facility-access/ssh-stable-con