gnome termnal question

[darose-prQxUZoa2zOsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org (David Rosenstrauch)]

On 03/12/2010 02:49 PM, theBlueSage wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> so I do a lot of work in a lot of terminals across some 25 servers. I do
> 99% of this work in gnome terminal as I like the tabbing and all the
> bells and whistles. However it has a 'missing feature' that my coworker
> has on his windows system (secureCRT). Sometimes I am idle on a server
> for a period of time that is longer than the default timeout set by the
> server's sshd_config. Obviously I get logged out. This is a pain when I
> am tailing '-f' a file that has no output for periods of time. The
> secureCRT has a feature where it pings the connection if there is no
> human or server real activity, thus keeping the connection open and
> alive. Is there any way of setting gnome terminal to do the same thing?
>
> I know I could just lengthen or remove the default timeout on the
> server, but I am not the only person going on it, and I dont want to
> open up the possibility of everyone else leaving SSH terms open all over
> the place, sucking resources etc ....
>
> Any thoughts suggestions welcome :)
>
> Richard

Why don't you just use Gnu screen 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnu_screen) and avoid the problem 
altogether?  Screen lets you open one or more bash sessions in a 
remote/ssh connection, then leave it running and detach from it, come 
back and re-attach later (from a different machine no less!)  Absolutely 
essential tool for any *nix admin or developer to add to their toolbox 
these days!

That said, the direct answer to the question you asked is that the SSH 
client provides the "anti-timeout" function you were asking about, 
though it's disabled by default.  Just add "ServerAliveInterval 240" (or 
some suitable length of time) to your ~/.ssh/config file.

HTH,

DR