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- On networks with firewalls, such as at Cornell, an ssh connection will be dropped if it remains idle.
- A drop can be prevented by configuring the client and/or server to send a “keep alive” packet so the connection is not strictly idle.
- The idle cut-off time on Cornell's networks is about 5 minutes. Thus, a keep-alive of 4 minutes should suffice.
- In Chemistry IT, we have set all our servers to 4 minutes and that has seemed to work well for our researchers (as of April 2016).
- MacOS clients: No good solution, alas.
- Chemistry IT is trying to craft a better solution at the network level. Contact us for an updated status report.