On 15 September 2018 at 09:50, Chris Bennett < cpb_m...@bennettconstruction.us> wrote:
> I am using my phone's hotspot, which may or may not be secure, but is > not censoring my choice of sites to visit. Public WiFi in the USA does > so all over the place. Worse, when I lived in Washington State, I was > next to a Naval Air Station, which certainly eavesdrops, not OK, but > this is the land of the free? Now I am living in the Capital of Texas, > Austin which also leaves public WiFi under the same problems > (legislature meets here). > > I cannot maintain an SSH connection unattended long enough to go to the > bathroom and get a cup of coffee without the connection being dropped > halfway through reading my email. > > Is autossh the right choice or is there a better way? > The flow of data seems to be the problem. A static page disconnects. > > Thanks, > Chris Bennett > I also have T-Mobile US, and I cannot reproduce your problem. In fact, because my laptop gets a public IPv6 address from T-Mobile US — a standard feature in Android 7.1.1, where you get at least a whole /64 from the carrier — I can put it to sleep, disable AndroidAP, go get coffee, lunch, dinner, or attend a meetup, or all of the above, come back home, turn AndroidAP back on, turn my laptop on, and my vanilla ssh connection will come back to live after a single keystroke (provided the phone was never turned off and didn't itself lose network connectivity, e.g., still has the same /64 assigned to itself). I did have to configure my laptop to `sysctl -w net.inet6.ip6.prefer_tempaddr=0`, and also make sure I'm not running something that'd be constantly refreshing the screen of the terminal I'm accessing through ssh, e.g., you definitely do have to disconnect tmux with the timestamp before you attempt this, and doing socks proxying would obviously interfere with it as well if any connections remain open when you attempt to turns things off like that, and — viola, problem solved. So, my suggestion — move to IPv6 for the killer features, and stop worrying about the disconnects. But if you don't have a public IP address on your laptop and do get your internet through NAT/CGNAT and/or a stateful firewall, then you might have to play with `-oServerAliveInterval=480` or some such, as per http://mdoc.su/o/ssh_config.5, but, otherwise, this option is actually not only unnecessary, but is, in fact, harmful, as it may "detect" brief periods of connectivity loss that you don't necessarily care about. P.S. Another option, if you don't necessarily care about scrolling, and/or already use tmux within your ssh, is to use http://ports.su/net/mosh. Personally, I prefer straight ssh through IPv6 to mosh, although sometimes it does cause me to use my AndroidAP even in venues where the public internet is available. Cheers, Constantine.SU.
