I'm reposting this post from Cosmin Stejerean (offbytwo.com) as a reminder to myself about how to solve this problem that's plagued me for years when connecting to the U via SSH.
'If you are having problems with your SSH connection getting dropped after a certain amount of time (usually caused by NAT firewalls and home routers), you can use the following setting to keep your connection alive
Host *
ServerAliveInterval 180
You can place this either in ~/.ssh/config for user level settings or in /etc/ssh/ssh_config for machine level settings. You may also replace * with a specific hostname or something like *.example.com to use on all machines within a domain. This is the cleanest way of making sure your connections stay up and doesn’t require changes to the destination servers (over which you may not have control)."
