In the past, my DSL connection has never dropped the ball on me while I
was "live".  Tonight, I had my ssh connection suddenly freeze on me while
I was paused staring at a piece of email.  The following event was
displayed on prometheus (my network gateway/DSL router, running NetBSD
1.6):

Nov  9 23:22:34 prometheus /netbsd: pppoe0: LCP keepalive timed out, going to restart the connection
Nov  9 23:22:49 prometheus /netbsd: pppoe0: received unexpected PADO

(I didn't check the time carefully, so I don't know when that happened
exactly.)

Although prometheus claimed to be restarting the connection, my SSH
connection (forwarded by prometheus, using NAT) seemed completely dead.
I wasn't sure if the DSL link was even live.  So I made sure that the link
was dead (manually) and restarted it.  Then I ssh'ed back in with another
process.


My question:  Should ssh be able to survive that?  My thought is that it
can't, because my IP number necessarily changed.  Unless ssh is a lot
brighter than I give it credit for...  (^&

My next question, if the asnwer to that question is "not by default": Is
there a way to configure ssh to do a better job (maybe to
renegotiate---even if I have to resupply a password---to get reconnected)?
(I suppose I could just use GNU screen to reattach to the process...  But
this seems like the sort of thing that ssh *could* handle, and by putting
it all into ssh, it would let me reattach X sessions, etc., not just
consoles...)

My last question, since I'm on the subject of transient connections: How
much trouble is it to get NetBSD's 1.6 pppoe device to automatically
raise/lower on network activity?  I've never done this kind of thing.  I
would check PPP to see what it can do, but I know that pppoe doesn't quite
fully use PPP (defaultroute support seems to be dropped), so before I
spend a day trying to find out why I can't get on-demand connections to
work, I thought that I'd ask where I should start looking.  (^&  Or does
anyone do on-demand connects with NetBSD?


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu