Know if tmate session have expired

[jav...@carnero.net]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a way to create a locked tmate session and send its ssh URL to a secure location when a remote computer starts up. At the moment I have it pretty much done, and I pretend to share it when it is finished. However I have a problem when I try to connect to a session that were created more than 24h before.

The message I have receiving is:
"Invalid or expired session token"

I understand this is happening because the tmate server is closing the session as it have been not used for several hours.

Is there an easy way, from this remote computer, to know if the session have expired and consequently create a new one?

Thanks.

[Nicolas Viennot]

Hi Javier,

I had to restart some servers recently, cutting all the opened connections. This was exceptional.

tmate should not drop sessions.

Further, the tmate client should support some reconnection feature at some point, to reconnect if the connection was dropped.

this is a little complicated, because 1) it might reconnect to a different server 2) all the terminal panes must be re-synced to some extent.

Sessions should not expire.

I don't think there's an easy way for telling if the session expired. But you can try:

$ curl https://tmate.io/api/t/SESSION_TOKEN

if the closed_at value is not null, the session has been closed for sure

This won't work in all cases (sessions are not expired on the database side just yet), but that might be a good start.

Nico

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[jav...@carnero.net]

Hi Nico, this is what I'm getting from a yesterday (and expired) session when I use curl:

{"ws_url_fmt":"wss://am2.tmate.io/ws/session/%s","ssh_cmd_fmt":"ssh %s...@am2.tmate.io","created_at":"2016-01-25T18:40:04.138564Z","closed_at":"2016-01-25T23:08:51.170331Z"}

As you can see, the session closed five hours after being created. Any idea why is this happening?

Anyway I'm incorporating the "closed_at" check to my script, as it adds more reliability. Thanks.