Re: help developing a good problem report

[Ryan Johnson <ryanjohn@ece.cmu.edu>]

On 26/05/2011 1:10 PM, Rance Hall wrote:
> I've been noticing an issue with cygwin that I find annoying and would
> like to fix.
>
> Ive never submitted a cygwin problem report before so this is a first.
>
> My issue now is that I dont actually understand the problem well
> enough to give a good report.
>
> Here is what is happening:
>
> I'm using mintty to run ssh and connect to a remote box.
>
> I shutdown the remote box.
>
> ssh client exits with error
>
> Mintty locks up and does not accept user input (no keystrokes) till
> windows kills the session and it is restarted.
>
> Mintty does not lock up if I exit the remote ssh session properly
> without a remote shutdown.
>
> Always reproducible on win 7 64bit host.
>
> How can I determine if the problem is ssh or mintty?
I also encounter this problem, but I don't think it's a bug. I think it 
has to do with network timeouts in ssh: as far as mintty is concerned, 
ssh is active and it (ssh) should continue to control the terminal. 
Meanwhile, ssh is blocked trying to access a socket which it doesn't 
(yet) know has died, and is therefore not accepting user input.

If you kill ssh manually using the task manager, mintty becomes 
responsive again. Since I usually open a new mintty for each ssh 
connection, I usually go the lazy route and just close mintty with the 
big red 'X' in the corner ;)

You might try looking at the man page for ssh_config, and playing with 
ServerAliveCountMax and ServerAliveInterval, whose default values 
apparently give a 45 second timeout. There's also the unrelated 
TCPKeepAlive setting, but that's enabled by default and I don't know how 
long its timeout is (quite long, if my experience looking for AWOL 
network printers is any indication).

Ryan


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