SSH disconnects very troubling

[Anne Moore]

That's awesome. Great idea! I'll do just that...

Thank you for your help. -Anne 

-----Original Message-----
From: Nikos Vassiliadis [mailto:nvass at teledomenet.gr] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 6:47 AM
To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Cc: Anne Moore
Subject: Re: SSH disconnects very troubling

On Tuesday 04 December 2007 02:40:35 Anne Moore wrote:
> Thanks, Kevin. This may well work with the SSH, but it's actually 
> disconnecting all my clients, telnet, Oracle, etc. There is a config 
> for telnet, but nothing for Oracle (that I know of). Also, ldap, etc. 
> It's the strangest thing!!

No it's not strange. There is a firewall between the hosts, which drops the
connections after some time of inactivity.

You can generate keepalive packets for every TCP connection between your
FreeBSD box and the world using ipfw. A rule
like:
allow tcp from any to any keep-state
will effectively keep all TCP connections alive.

Two things:
1) If you are not familiar with ipfw, read the manual before
	loading the ipfw module. Otherwise, you'll be locked
	out of your box.
2) I don't know if the above rules fits your security policy.
	Or the services your FreeBSD box provides. Modify as
	needed.

HTH, Nikos