Somewhat OT -- Looking for ideas on how to test status of SSH TCP tunnel

[STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT)]

I wrote a program which does this, along with the
ability to restart an ssh tunnel.  The web page
http://www.swlink.net/~styma/SunAtHome/sshKeepAlive.html
describes the program and how it works.  The source is
at
http://www.swlink.net/~styma/SunAtHome/sample_files/sshr_cron.c.html
The web page also has a link to a gzip'ed copy of the
program.

The way the program works, is you have your ssh tunnel tunnel some
port to the echo server on the remote machine.  The program is
run from a cron job and opens a the tunnel, sends data down the
tunnel, reads the echo'ed data and verifies that it got back what
it read.  It contains code to restart the tunnel (using keys not
passwords) in the event something is wrong.  It is known to
work on both Fedora and Solaris sparc.

Hope this helps.

Bob Styma