How to tell if an ssh ControlMaster connection is in use

Question

I'd like to use ssh's ControlMaster feature to share connections for speed increases. I'm trying to script it so that I can start/restart/stop a number of connections to different hosts.

How can I determine whether any of these connections are in use? If I kill them when an ssh session is open, it gets closed

My restart script would ideally look like (pseudo-script) - the stop script would be equivalent without the ssh command at the bottom:

for HOST in $HOST_LIST
  do
    MASTER_PID=`find_master_pid $HOST`
    if $MASTER_PID
      then
        if `find_child_pid`
          echo Connection to $HOST in use: not terminating
        else
          kill -SIGHUP $MASTER_PID
        fi
    ssh -TMNf $HOST

Solution 1

You could simply use

ssh -o ControlPath=$socket -O check 

for each $socket you've open (easy if you keep them in a single directory).

This returns 255 if the check fails (connection not active anymore), an other value if it pass. You may need to specify the hostname too, but nothing that an awk on $socket won't give you :)

Solution 2

@Renik's answer didn't work for me. See below for what did.

---

This works for me using just the socket file for the control master:

$ ssh -o ControlPath=~/.ssh/<controlfile> -O check <bogus arg>

NOTE: You can also use ssh -S ~/.ssh/<controlfile> ... as well, which is a bit shorter form of the above.

Example

Here's an example where I've already established a connection to a remote server:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-57db26a0499dfd881986e23a2e4dd5c5c63e26c2 -O check blah
Master running (pid=89228)
$

And with it disconnected:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-66496a62823573e4760469df70e57ce4c15afd74 -O check blah
Control socket connect(/Users/user1/.ssh/master-66496a62823573e4760469df70e57ce4c15afd74): No such file or directory
$

If it were still connected, this would force it to exit immediately:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-66496a62823573e4760469df70e57ce4c15afd74 -O exit blah
Exit request sent.
$

It's unclear to me, but it would appear to potentially be a bug in ssh that it requires an additional argument at the end, even though blah is meaningless in the context of the switches I'm using.

Without it gives me this:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-57db26a0499dfd881986e23a2e4dd5c5c63e26c2 -O check
usage: ssh [-1246AaCfGgKkMNnqsTtVvXxYy] [-b bind_address] [-c cipher_spec]
           [-D [bind_address:]port] [-E log_file] [-e escape_char]
           [-F configfile] [-I pkcs11] [-i identity_file]
           [-L [bind_address:]port:host:hostport] [-l login_name] [-m mac_spec]
           [-O ctl_cmd] [-o option] [-p port]
           [-Q cipher | cipher-auth | mac | kex | key]
           [-R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport] [-S ctl_path] [-W host:port]
           [-w local_tun[:remote_tun]] [user@]hostname [command]

Version info

OSX

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_6.9p1, LibreSSL 2.1.8

CentOS 7.x

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_7.4p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2k-fips  26 Jan 2017

I confirmed that on both of these versions, the need for the additional bogus argument was required.

References

• How to close (kill) ssh ControlMaster connections manually
• How to exit OpenSSH control master process without using lsof or fuser?

Solution 3

I wrote a utility that eases management of SSH ControlMaster connections. It's called cmc: TimidRobot/cmc: ControlMaster Controller - Eases management of SSH ControlMaster connections.

Comments

[user1871402]

That's much simpler for seeing if the existing connection is open; it doesn't tell me if it is actually being used, but I guess that isn't so important... (and I have the method below)

[Dan Lenski]

The problem with this is it will hang forever in some cases, even with ConnectTimeout options. For example, if I have a control socket "open" to some_host over a network route that no longer exists, ssh -o ConnectTimeout=5 -O check some_host hangs forever. OpenSSH itself appears to have no way to detect/recover from this: I have to use timeout 5 ssh -O check some_host.