A lot of work gets done using SSH and one of the most frustrating things to happen is when the remote server disconnects you due to inactivity, but while you had your environment set up just the right way for the tasks you were doing. Imagine that you had to have a number of environment variables set just right in your remote shell and you stepped out for lunch only to come back to this...



Frustration! You have to start all over again! Well there is a way to actually prevent this from happening in the first place by using the SSH server keep-alive setting.

If you're using PuTTY, in the connection preferences you can set a value to send a 'heartbeat' to the server, 60 is a good value to use.




If you're connecting from a Unix based environment simply edit your ~/.ssh/config file (or create one if it doesn't exist) and set it up like this...


Instead of * you can specify an actual server hostname but it makes sense to have it configured for all servers with a wildcard.

-i