Comment by solso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solso | Hacker News Reader

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The glitches with the ssh tunnel were not for the redis replication setup. This has been running fine for 3 weeks already.

However we also use ssh tunnels for our continuous integration (jenkins) and the irc bots that we use for development (http://3scale.github.com/2012/06/29/irc-driven-development-p...).

In this setup we have the autossh going awol every one or two weeks. But as the blog post mentions, the ssh tunnel runs between our HQ (fiber) and Amazon, not very reliable. Furthermore, there is a lot of idle periods, which seems to trigger most of the issues. We cannot give more specifics since we forcefully just restart the daemon with a monit/munin combo.

Firewalls (which may be beyond your control and that you may not even be aware of) between you and the other end often drop connections that have been idle for a while (anything from 5 minutes to a couple of hours), especially if the firewall is busy tracking tens of thousands of active connections.

The outbound firewall of our company drops my outbound ssh connections if they are idle for just 5 minutes. Adding:-

  Host *
    ServerAliveInterval 60

in my ~/.ssh/config file prevented most of the drops (the rest are explained by proper network outages or my DSL connection at home flapping.)

A corresponding ClientAliveInterval setting in the sshd_config file also helps mask the problem [EDIT] if I ssh home from a machine at work that doesn't share my home directory ssh config file.

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