ssh & sftp terminal timeout

[Tony Crouch]

Hi Tim, 
Yeah, I don't really understand it either. I have asked my uni to look
into it (several months back ... probably October last year), but have
not as yet received a reply.

One of the system admins did mention to my in passing he was
experiencing the same problem when connecting from home, not directly
connecting at the uni. So I was hazard a guess its something to do with
their firewall or something.

A friend of mine suggestions writing a script which, on logging in to
the remote machines, automatically performs a task (i.e. display a list
of people logged in and write this to a file which is continually
overwritten as so that the file does not impinge greatly on my quota)
every 5 minutes as to keep the connection alive.

Would anyone be able to offer some hints / suggestions as to how this
may be done? I have had a go myself, but (as usual) failed miserably.

Thanks again.

All the best.

Cheers, 
Tony Crouch