Shell Time-out

It is a simple, but annoying problem. You login to a remote server using ssh and start working on a long program. You start editing away and the phone rings, you leave the computer only to find that it is your uncle bob, who never stops talking! When you return to the computer after 38 minutes, your login window has frozen!! As a result you have lost all the editing work.

What happens

Check around in the web and we see a lot of variation in the explanations given to this behavior. In fact it can be any bottle-neck down the line from your computer (client) to the server that is closing the connection automatically after some time of inactivity. There are various solutions for each of these, but I believe it is not worthwhile to spend time on figuring out each of these in many practical situations. For example, in order to access a linux server in the outside world from my pc at office [23:27, 5 September 2006 (JST)] outside world I have to hop through no less than three servers due to various 'security measures' -- good luck if someone wants to find out which part is causing the trouble.

Fourtunately there are easy alternatives to this painstaking detective work.

Lazy solution

Usually I login by ssh with X11 Forwarding:

ssh -X myname@server

or

ssh -Y myname@server