[aklug] Re: resuming borked sessions

From: Royce Williams <royce@tycho.org>
Date: Mon Feb 24 2014 - 05:56:43 AKST

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 9:52 PM, Christopher Howard
<christopher.howard@frigidcode.com> wrote:
>
> Recently I was curious about something:
>
> Has anyone every heard of a protocol (or perhaps some reconfiguration of a TCP/IP protocol) below the application layer which allows (stateful) sessions to be resumed after an extended break in the connection (e.g., hours or even days). Again, below the application layer is the idea here, though perhaps the application layer protocol would need to be accommodating in some way (e.g., not crashing if no data was received from the other application).
>
> E.g., when I use suspend on my desktop system, and resume a few hours later, nearly everything comes back up just as it was... applications, processes, local device mounts. The OS would be more than happy to continue sending data out the networking connections, as though nothing had happened, but of course the connections have long ago died on the other end.

Try Mosh. Never tried it myself (really been meaning to!) ... but if
you have the luxury of installing a daemon on the server side (or an
intermediate box that is up all the time):

    http://mosh.mit.edu/

From the blurb:

"With Mosh, you can put your laptop to sleep and wake it up later,
keeping your connection intact. If your Internet connection drops,
Mosh will warn you -- but the connection resumes when network service
comes back."

... and:

"Mosh automatically roams as you move between Internet connections.
Use Wi-Fi on the train, Ethernet in a hotel, and LTE on a beach:
you'll stay logged in. Most network programs lose their connections
after roaming, including SSH and Web apps like Gmail. Mosh is
different."

And even if it's not just SSH, you might still be able to get away
with it -- because you can tunnel quite a bit over SSH, such that you
could make your persistent be sourced from the Mosh server, keep the
Mosh server up all the time, and the session between you and the Mosh
server will be resumable.

Mosh can probably happily coexist with sshd, by having it listen on an
alternate port.

Strangely, it's UDP based(!), but they put a lot of work into
designing the higher layers to robustly handle that. Seems pretty
well baked - threads all over the Interwebs of people using it.

Royce
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Received on Mon, 24 Feb 2014 05:56:43 -0900

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