ssh interactive session, through intermediate hosts ... problems ...

[David Brodbeck]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Josh Suid <joshsuid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> First, where on the ssh client command line (see above) can I specify a more
> liberal timeout value ?  Since my interactive session has three or more layers
> of host between it, the whole thing falls apart if even one link slows down a
> bit...  how can I make my ssh sessions more tolerant to timeouts ?

At what point are you seeing timeouts?

I've found many home routers time out idle TCP sessions quite quickly,
so if it's the first jump, you may find enabling ClientAliveInterval
helps.  I find a setting of 300 seconds (5 minutes) is frequent enough
to keep most routers happy.

> Second, how can I construct this session with just a single command ?  When I
> try this:
>
> ssh user at host ssh user at host2 ssh user at host3
>
> I get this error:
>
> # ssh user at host ssh user at host2
> Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.
> Permission denied (publickey,keyboard-interactive).
>
> Is there a way to build this tunnel with a single command ? (an ssh command,
> run over an ssh command, run over an ssh command)

Normally when you execute a command over SSH it doesn't allocate a
pseudo-tty, like it normally will for an interactive session.  You
might try passing the -t command to force allocation of a ptty.

Another option would be to use ssh -L to create a tunnel from one host
to another, then running ssh over that tunnel.  This would also work
with scp.  You may run into problems with host keys, though.