How to keep persistant SSH sessions?

Question

There's a server I'd like to be connected to at all times that I have an internet connection. Sometimes I turn off my laptop, sometimes my connection drops, sometimes I go from wired to wireless or vice versa. Is there any solution to get it to automatically reconnect whenever possible and resume my screen session?

Answer 1

I suspect that autossh, possibly with a little bit of scripting to automatically reconnect to the screen session, will be the way to go.

Answer 2

I've never used it myself, but if I remember my hearsay correctly, Putty Tray will do that http://putty-tray.en.softonic.com/

Please comment if I'm wrong and leading John down the wrong path.

Answer 3

You could consider running ssh in a wrapper script.

#!/bin/sh
while ! ssh "$@"; do
   echo "Reconnecting..." >/dev/stderr
done

Call the script "ssh-forever" and use it with, for example:

$ ssh-forever -t user@host screen -DR

Answer 4

screen command is what you need, you can attach or detach to the terminal from different locations:

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_screen