[YLUG] ssh to York

[Craig Genner]

On Monday 29 June 2009 23:01:31 Roger Leigh wrote:
> > It'll be killed after just over an hour of inactivity. This is a  
> > feature, not a bug as otherwise the box gets slowly filled up with  
> > discarded sessions.
>
> I'd have to say, I do find this to be more of a "bug" than a
> "feature".  I find my SSH sessions regularly freezing, because
> I do tend to do non-computer work and come back to find it's
> frozen up.  SSH doesn't even recognise that it has been
> disconnected for quite some time, leaving the terminal unusable.
> This happens to me quite a lot throughout the day; if I hadn't
> discovered GNU screen, I'd be rather miffed by now!
>
> If the suggestion of using ServerAliveInterval works, I'll start
> doing that, or else always run in batch mode with a control
> socket (which sets that option implicitly).

So a bug in ssh not realising that the connection has been dropped, but also a 
feature in the firewall to stop it's state tables being so big it can't manage 
them.

I've seen what happens when a single box tries to connect to port 8080 in the 
whole ip address space, the vey large firewall cluster in front of the box 
spent a good 30 minutes failing between members of the cluster before the 
admins could get onto the cluster and tell them to drop all traffic from that 
box.  Not pretty and very anoying if you are caught in the middle of it.

Craig