Prevent SSH timeouts: disable keepalive

I never had the problem at home but on many other networks an idle connection would drop after a couple of minutes. I added this to ~/.ssh/config several hours ago and haven’t lost a connection since:

TCPKeepAlive no
ServerAliveInterval 20
ServerAliveCountMax 10

It’s counter-intuitive but it works for me. The usual disclaimers apply.

Posted by Andy Skelton on May 16, 2008

http://andy.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/prevent-ssh-timeouts-disable-keepalive/