Question

SSH connection drops too frequently

Posted on October 13, 2019
CentOS
Asked by Georgi Dimitrov

Hi guys,

So in the recent two days, I’ve come back to my projects. I left them for about a month or so. I noticed when I work on my droplet, my SSH connection is fine but if I leave if for more than 5 minutes, it just drops.

Can you guys assist me, is this something specific to Digital Ocean droplets?

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

KFSys

Site Moderator

• October 13, 2019

Accepted Answer

Hi @Remdore ,

I can see this has been fully discussed HERE

To paraphrase, in order to keep your connection alive for more than the default time, some adjustments will be needed.

First, you’ll need to edit your sshd_config file.

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find the following lins and uncomment them

TCPKeepAlive
ClientAliveInterval
ClientAliveCountMax

Once you do, change their values to

TCPKeepAlive yes
ClientAliveInterval 30
ClientAliveCountMax 99999

Save the changes you’ve made and restart your sshd service

service sshd restart

Regards, KDSys

KFSys

Site Moderator

• May 27, 2022

Hello all,

I’m giving an updated answer on the question so that it’s easier to follow:

To paraphrase, in order to keep your connection alive for more than the default time, some adjustments will be needed.

First, you’ll need to edit your sshd_config file.

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Find the following lins and uncomment them

TCPKeepAlive
ClientAliveInterval
ClientAliveCountMax

Once you do, change their values to

TCPKeepAlive yes
ClientAliveInterval 30
ClientAliveCountMax 99999

Save the changes you’ve made and restart your sshd service

service sshd restart

You need to edit your local SSH config as well. You’ve finished the first part with the questions you’ve provided.

What you need to do is add

ServerAliveInterval 30

locally.

There a couple of ways to do so. You can add it in the /etc/ssh/ssh_config file like so

ServerAliveInterval 10

or in your .ssh/config file:

Host *
   ServerAliveInterval 10

Robertwalt • October 16, 2019

Either you have made the changes that have lead to the issue or your hosting server. Contact the support team from your hosting site or visit their FAQs to know whether they have your answer.