June 8th, 2006 at 1336 UTC

DO NOT RUN TOP – it requires too much overhead(processor cycles) and your sysadmin will kill it if he notices anyway.

Absolutely not true.

1> It only uses many cycles if you have the interval set way too short, like under .5 seconds

2> if your sysadmin is obsessed with you not using top, he/she should simply disable your ability to run it, not ‘kill it’ once you do.

ServerAliveInterval

is limited by

ServerAliveCountMax

and that ServerAliveCountMax is set to 3 by default!

That is, if you set ServerAliveInterval to 60 and ServerAliveCountMax is left to default value (3), after the client has sent 3 keep alive packets it will disconnect. That makes 60 x 3 = 180 seconds.

So if you want more time away, you set ServerAliveInterval to 60 and ServerAliveCountMax to the numer you want (for example: 100). The client will send one keep alive packet every 0 seconds for 100 times or, if you prefer, 100 keep alive packets, one every 60 seconds.

You set this up in your $HOME/.ssh/config file.

Most of these options are explained in man ssh_config.

Thanks a lot to Cam for pointing us all in the right direction!!!!

ServerAliveInterval 60

is perfect and elegant. I used it with success. Thank you.