Re: resuming dropped ssh connections

[Steve <dsec-nospam@braingia.org>]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 Shannon R. wrote:
> i do most of my work thru a ssh connection to a remote
> debian server. i've been having connection problems
> lately though and would get disconnected almost every
> hour or two.
> 
> is it possible to resume dropped ssh connections as if
> i was never disconnected? im using putty as ssh client
> on a windows machine.

As others have pointed out, screen is your friend.  I'm more curious as
to the cause of the disconnections though.  Have you traced the root
cause?  Since you mentioned that you use PuTTY, did you have a look at
the "Seconds between keepalives" option under 'Connection'?  I've
noticed that this is all but required when connecting from some
locations such as hotels.  See the PuTTY docs for important caveats on 
using this though:

http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.58/htmldoc/Chapter4.html#config-connection

Also, note that the TCPKeepAlive option (different than the keepalive
already discussed for putty) defaults to yes which means that
connections will (may) be killed if there's a network problem between
you and the host.  ClientAliveInterval and ClientAliveCountMax are also
important here, man sshd_config (5) for more information.

Steve