Various keepalive extensions

Add compatibility aliases for ProtocolKeepAlives and SetupTimeOut, supported
in previous versions of Debian's OpenSSH package but since superseded by
ServerAliveInterval.  (We're probably stuck with this bit for
compatibility.)

In batch mode, default ServerAliveInterval to five minutes.

Adjust documentation to match and to give some more advice on use of
keepalives.

Author: Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Author: Matthew Vernon <matthew@debian.org>
Author: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>
Last-Update: 2013-09-14

Patch-Name: keepalive-extensions.patch

1 files changed, 19 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/ssh_config.5 b/ssh_config.5
index 473971e63..3172fd441 100644
--- a/ssh_config.5
+++ b/ssh_config.5
@@ -205,8 +205,12 @@ Valid arguments are
 If set to
 .Dq yes ,
 passphrase/password querying will be disabled.
+In addition, the
+.Cm ServerAliveInterval
+option will be set to 300 seconds by default.
 This option is useful in scripts and other batch jobs where no user
-is present to supply the password.
+is present to supply the password,
+and where it is desirable to detect a broken network swiftly.
 The argument must be
 .Dq yes
 or
@@ -1305,8 +1309,15 @@ from the server,
 will send a message through the encrypted
 channel to request a response from the server.
 The default
-is 0, indicating that these messages will not be sent to the server.
+is 0, indicating that these messages will not be sent to the server,
+or 300 if the
+.Cm BatchMode
+option is set.
 This option applies to protocol version 2 only.
+.Cm ProtocolKeepAlives
+and
+.Cm SetupTimeOut
+are Debian-specific compatibility aliases for this option.
 .It Cm StrictHostKeyChecking
 If this flag is set to
 .Dq yes ,
@@ -1345,6 +1356,12 @@ Specifies whether the system should send TCP keepalive messages to the
 other side.
 If they are sent, death of the connection or crash of one
 of the machines will be properly noticed.
+This option only uses TCP keepalives (as opposed to using ssh level
+keepalives), so takes a long time to notice when the connection dies.
+As such, you probably want
+the
+.Cm ServerAliveInterval
+option as well.
 However, this means that
 connections will die if the route is down temporarily, and some people
 find it annoying.