ssh connections now freezing, if left idle for a few minutes

[Tom Horsley]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 09:02:30 +1100
Cameron Simpson wrote:

>   ServerAliveInterval   17

I tried all that stuff for the ssh connection I run
from my system at work, through the firewall, and
to my system at home, but still never got it to
stay up all the time.

I now have cron jobs that check ssh-keyscan
every 5 minutes or so in both directions and
a loop that re-initializes the connection from
scratch if it ever fails to do the keyscans
successfully. So far it has been pretty
reliable - I think doing the keyscans helps
keep the connections up.