I recently wiped my Red Hat 9 Box and installed CentOS 3.4. The box is actually located on a rack in the closet next to my firewall and router. So I don't usually go in the closet and mess with the local terminal.

Now when I SSH from another computer on the local subnet or remotely from work is where my problem arises. If I go away from the computer for 4 or 5 mins just to have a smoke when I come back the screen is frozen. It won't let me type or enter commands and what not. I can log on another window and see that the account is still active and completes what ever project it was doing (tested compiling several things). Lots of threads say this can be caused by running a background process but this can happen if I've launched no processes or even typed any commands. Just simply idleing at the bash prompt will cause this freeze. Red Hat 9, FC1-3, and Debian all three work fine without this problem.

I'm a relative new person to root access but have been using ssh and linux for over 8 years and have never witnessed this problem. If there is anything I can do to help you help me please feel free to ask for any pertinent information.

Thanks for any help ahead of time.

maybe auto logout is enabled for SSH? That would explain why you are kicked out but not totally because you have a job running?

If thats so try installing screen and using it to run jobs that take a long time to run.

grep -R TMOUT /etc/*

Returns no results. Otherwards auto logout hasn't been defined. As far as using screen, the task at hand finishes but the terminal is still frozen. So screening it would really do no good. I can be idle at just the bash prompt and it will hang up without doing anything.

Upon loading some debugging software and a software jacket on the computer I SSH in from, I may have located the problem. It appears to the the SSH Client PuTTy. For some reason the new build freezes up with several distro's of linux if left idle. I tested it on Fedora Core 2 & 3, Debian, Mandrake, and Slackware 9 point something with no problems. But CentOS and Gentoo I had problems with it freezing up.