SSH Timeouts

Do you work in an environment where you bounce through a bunch of firewalls? Do you hang out on idle ssh connections that often times get dropped after a certain amount of idle time? I do and it has always annoyed me. To the point that once I connect to a box that I will be coming back to, I will run top and move on. Well, not anymore. You can set your SSH client to automatically send a bit of data over your connection every X seconds. Here is how it is done for Mac and Linux boxes.

In your home directory, edit your .ssh/config file. If you don’t have one, that’s not a problem, simply create a new one. Then enter in the following line:

And you’re done! Now wasn’t that easy?

Happy terminal camping partner!