Secure Shell on ARM Chromebook - Explain Sleep Function - Seems magic..

[Craig Errington]

I'm using Secure Shell 0.8.8 on the ARM Samsung Chromebook.. Just started using it yesterday..

I'm used to pretty unstable connections with PuTTY but I've just seen something that I can only describe as magic with Secure Shell, and I'm not sure if it's ChromeOS that's responsible or Secure Shell..

When I closed the lid of the Chromebook I had an active SSH session open connected to an IRC client....I opened the Chromebook again, and it resumed from sleep, it had to reconnect to wifi, and then as soon as it was re-connected, my SSH session updated and I was back exactly where I'd left it.

This is obviously not a complaint - that's awesome... But can anyone explain to me what's going on?

Is Secure Shell just automatically attempting a re-connect and I'm just luckily being thrown back to where I was? I'm used to a windows laptop where I close the lid, it goes to sleep, then when it wakes I have 20 dead PuTTY connections that I have to manually re-connect, but this seems to do it all automatically...

[Robert Ginda]

I think it depends a lot on the socket timeouts set on the server side, and how long you had the lid closed for.  Secure Shell doesn't do anything magic here.  It could be that PuTTY forcibly closes your connections when it detects a sleep/wake, while Secure Shell lets the chips fall where they may.

The downside to Secure Shell's approach is that sometimes the server closes the socket, but the client doesn't notice.  You end up with an unresponsive terminal in that case.  Just type the sequence "ENTER ~ ." to force-close the client side of the connection.

Rob.