how to keep an ssh connection from closing?

Question

I'm trying to run a command that might take 1+ hours and I've tried adding

while sleep 300; do echo "1"; done

so that it doesn't disconnect me for being idle and it worked.

But it still disconnects after sometimes for another reason it says Connection to *.*.*.* closed by remote host.

I guess its just a default time limit or something I don't really know?

Is there a way to increase that time or just make it never disconnects?

If not is there a way to keep that command running even after closing the ssh connection ?

Solution

If you can't change the server setting, you should start your ssh by specifying frequent keep-alive signals to allow your command to complete. E.g.

ssh -o ServerAliveInterval=20 [email protected]

should issue an "alive" signal every 20 seconds towards the server, so that it keep the connection alive