Adding a clock in screen to avoid your ssh’s from being killed

By halfgaar | On October 31, 2012 at 11:10 | 5 comments

The world is filled with stupid routers, which kill all connections that have no activity for a while (even a very short while). I keep loosing my SSH sessions because of this. To fix it, I added a clock in my GNU screen bar:

hardstatus alwayslastline "%= %H | %l | [%c:%s]"

For the record, my entire .screenrc:

multiuser on
caption always "%{= kB}%-Lw%{=s kB}%50>%n%f* %t %{-}%+Lw%<"
vbell off
startup_message off
term linux
hardstatus alwayslastline "%= %H | %l | [%c:%s]"

Posted by halfgaar on October 31, 2012 at 11:10

5 Comments ( Add comment / trackback )

  1. (permalink)
    Comment by Rowan Rodrik
    On October 31, 2012 at 19:53

    Screenshot or it didn’t happen. ;-)

  2. (permalink)
    Comment by halfgaar
    On November 1, 2012 at 13:18

    Blog with working image upload, or it didn’t happen :) (or did you finally fix that…?

  3. (permalink)
    Comment by Rowan Rodrik
    On December 29, 2012 at 00:37

    Working image uploads. It just happened.

  4. (permalink)
    Comment by YC
    On April 12, 2013 at 11:24

    Alternatively you could set a ServerAliveInterval in .ssh/config so that it kind of sends a heartbeat signal if your connection is idle.

  5. (permalink)
    Comment by halfgaar
    On April 27, 2013 at 13:21

    How does that play with momentary connection dropouts? Because the server option TCPKeepAlive says this:

    However, this means that connections will die if the route is down temporarily

    man ssh_config doesn’t say such a thing about ServerAliveInterval, so I guess it’s fine.

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