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Comment by malloc2x | Hacker News Reader

Better to use, e.g.:

  ssh -fN -o ServerAliveInterval="240" -R 2222:localhost:22 example.com

(And on example.com ssh -p 2222 localhost)

This lets you easily keep the tunnel open long-term. Why?

  -f    Background the ssh process (don't need nohup)
  -N    Don't run any command
  -o... Make ssh do the work of keeping the session alive forever

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The ServerAliveInterval option might also help with another issue mentioned in the post:

'sshfs_mount' is not really stable, any network failure will be troublesome'

To avoid trouble with remote backups and other long running processes, I always add the following to the end of ~/.ssh/config or /etc/ssh_config:

    Host *
        ServerAliveInterval 300

But the remote host can limit your ServerAliveInterval, however most hosts don't close your session if there is something running. On our clusters this is the only working solution, and I tried both, trust me.

If that's an issue (I've never met a server like that, not to mention one like that and I couldn't change the setting) then wouldn't you rather use this?

  while [ true ]; do sleep 1000; done

Just using:

  sleep 1000; exit

means you can't make new connections after 17 minutes.

Yes, in fact I use the first one (while true; sleep; ls) but I thought the second is more succint. Anyone interested can make a loop. Please notice that most of the snippets aren't meant to be copied & pasted, but rather analyzed and understood by the user.

Ah, sometimes that's a hard line to draw since often the people that know enough to understand not to take it literally don't really need the pointer in the first place. :)

I enjoyed your list.

This is excellent, thank you!

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