Thursday, January 07, 2016

Keep Your SSH Session ALIVE!!

Most of us have had those days where we have a bunch of windows open, ssh'd into multiple servers.  You get caught up working on one of those servers and forget about your other ssh sessions.  Or, if you are like me, you are using something like screen/tmux and have many sessions going at the same time that you want to keep alive.

Well, with the default ssh setup, there is a setting in your ssh_config file called "ServerAliveInterval".  Initially (at least on my system) it is commented out and also has a value of zero (0).  

In order to keep your sessions alive indefinitely, you will need to uncomment that variable in the ssh_config file and set it to a value other than zero.  I have mine set to 60. 

What this variable does is tell ssh that it needs to send a packet across the wire to the connected server so that there is traffic, keeping the connection active, not letting it time out. 


So, by to keep your sessions alive, you will need to make the changes as above, but also, do not forget that this change will only effect new connections made after you save the change.  If you have active connections, you will need to exit them out and restart them.  If you don't, they will still be subject to the same issue you just corrected.

Go now, keep those connections alive! 

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Online Learning - Open Source Society (Computer Science)

Almost a year ago (1/31/2015 to be exact), I posted an article about online learning.  I reviewed a number of online places to take courses and learn a new skill and provided the list. 

In my research around the internet I stumbled across another resource which I have found very valuable.  I am referring to the Open Source Society page on Github.  The OSS has the tag line "Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science".  This is great for someone similar to myself, who his completely self-taught, or is looking for an inexpensive way to get into the field, starting with Computer Science. 

The courses listed are sourced from several of the places that I reviewed in my previous article (MIT, Stanford, Coursera, Udacity, Edx, etc) and are all Free for the taking/learning.  The nice thing is, you don't have to go searching through and navigating each of the individual sites, the links are all gathered for you there on the OSS page. 

Hopefully this comes in as handy for everyone as it has for me.

 
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