"KeepAlive no" -- Will This Work For Me?

From: Al Cohen (amc79@nojunk.please.cornell.edu)
Date: 01/08/03 

Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 22:04:20 -0500
From: Al Cohen <amc79@nojunk.please.cornell.edu>

We have an SSH tunnel running over some DSL lines that sometimes dies,
which causes us great anguish and gnashing of teeth. Sometimes it is up
for many days -- sometimes it dies a few times in a few hours. Because
of the lack of consistancy, I assume that the connection is occasionally
interrupted by *something*, and the connection says "OK, can't connect,
might as well shut down".

I did a little research tonight, and it looks to me that if I set
"KeepAlive no" in the ssh_config and sshd_config of the respective
machines, the tunnel should stay open even if there is an interruption
-- the KeepAlive messages will not be sent, and thus neither side will
know if the tunnel goes down.

First question: Do I understand correctly?

Second question: If this will, in fact, keep our tunnel open, are there
any downsides to this? If one machine reboots, will it not be able to
reestablish the tunnel?

Thanks in advance for all wise answers!

Al Cohen
www.alcohen.com

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