idle timeouts (ssh and telnet): where is this set?

[Kate & Randy]

From my machine at home running DSL, I telnet and ssh to various
Solaris machines at our university, and after a few minutes idle time,
it disconnects me. I played with the 'autologout' variable but it
seems to have no effect. What is it that's causing these timeouts?

Thanks!

[Dave Uhring]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 02:15:55 +0000, Kate & Randy wrote:

> From my machine at home running DSL, I telnet and ssh to various
> Solaris machines at our university, and after a few minutes idle time,
> it disconnects me. I played with the 'autologout' variable but it
> seems to have no effect. What is it that's causing these timeouts?

You are using pppoe on your DSL connection?

I have had an ssh session connecting this Ultra 1 to a PeeCee running RH-8
on line, local network, for the last 7 hours.

[Wayne]

Depending on your shell you might look for "TMOUT" environment
variable being set to something other than zero.

One site I know of used a tricky method to end sessions: in
/etc/profile, a background job was started with sleep and kill
commands. This method gave warnings at 5 minutes left and one
minute left. A "ps" command can be used to detect this.

-Wayne

Kate & Randy wrote:

> From my machine at home running DSL, I telnet and ssh to various
> Solaris machines at our university, and after a few minutes idle time,
> it disconnects me. I played with the 'autologout' variable but it
> seems to have no effect. What is it that's causing these timeouts?
>
> Thanks!
>

[Dave Uhring]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 02:04:51 -0700, Atif Munir wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Timeout is set in the shell...not with telnet nor ssh.....you may do
> this in the .profile of any user as under
> vi $HOME/.profile
> TMOUT=0
> save the file and exit
> now its set at 0 ...you may change it to any required value.

That won't do a bit of good if the pppoe connection is timing out. That
type of link must be kept alive by ongoing activity at the client, perhaps
a periodic ISP mail check.

[Jeremiah DeWitt Weiner]

Kate & Randy <kate.randy@verizon.net> wrote:

> From my machine at home running DSL, I telnet and ssh to various
> Solaris machines at our university, and after a few minutes idle time,
> it disconnects me. I played with the 'autologout' variable but it
> seems to have no effect. What is it that's causing these timeouts?

Hard to know exactly, but I've had similar experiences. I think
it's sometimes caused by a firewall which is aggressively trying to keep
the number of connections down. The most helpful thing I've found is
"spinner" by Joe Laffey: [url]http://www.laffeycomputer.com/spinner.html[/url]
It puts a series of characters into the upper-left-hand corner of the
terminal window (or null characters, if you prefer) and that activity
can help keeps links open.