How to avoid ssh time outs?

When ssh times out it will terminate or you will get error message

write failed : broken pipe

There are two solutions. One is to configure the SSH server to send a packet to the client, and the other is to configure your SSH client to send a packet to the server. If you have lots of servers, setting it on the client will be easiest. If you connect to a single server from lots of different locations, then setting it on the server will make more sense. Or, you can configure both to do it.

Configure the server
Open up/etc/ssh/sshd_configand find the ClientAliveInterval option (if it’s not there, add it). The value is in seconds, so I went with 180 seconds, or  3 minutes.

ClientAliveInterval 180

Configure the client

Edit  /etc/ssh/ssh_config
and find the ServerAliveInterval option (if it’s not there, add it). Again, this value is in seconds, so a 9-minute interval is 180 seconds.

ServerAliveInterval 180

The default of both of these values is 0, which means no alive packets are sent. Setting them to anything other than 0 makes the SSH server or client send a packet across the encrypted SSH channel every ‘n’ seconds, thus avoid the idle timeout on the router. It has finally resolved my timeout issues, for which I’m very grateful.