Somewhat OT -- Looking for ideas on how to test status of SSH TCP tunnel

[Bruce McPeek]

Hello,

I am planning on setting up a TCP tunnel through an SSH connection
between our Korean office's intranet and our US office's intranet. This
tunnel will be used to provide a connection between a Perforce Proxy
server in Korea and our main Perforce server (Redhat 9) in the US.

The OS for Korean proxy server will be Redhat FC3 using OpenSSH. I may
have to give up this server at some point in the future and go Windows
as the underlying OS, if that happens I would like to use Plink (from
the maker of PuTTY http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/).

I plan to set up the account used to connect our SSH server to a pretty
restricted state; no login shell and port forwarding restricted to a
specific ip:port.

I am planning to script the SSH connection on the client side to
reconnect should the connection drop. This should be a fairly trivial
task. Unfortunately I have seen long running SSH tunnels in a state
where they appear to be connected but no data flows through the tunnel
or to the login shell. I would like test for this condition in my script
but I am unsure which approach to take.

I could conceivably try to connect through the tunnel to the server
using some utility but which one? I could conceivable try using the
Perforce client but would rather not consume a license to do this.
Perhaps I could open have a second tunnel open just to test the
connection, but what would be good to use?


Best regards,

Bruce McPeek
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