SSH avoid “Connection reset by peer”

If you are a regular SSH user, there are chances that you sometimes faced the error message “Connection reset by peer”. To avoid this message, you can edit some settings on server side or on client side. In this post I will show you both case.

Client side

Putty

If you are using Putty, there is a setting under the “Connection” tab that allow you to set the keepalive value. By default it’s disabled (value is 0).

You can set the value at 240 and each 240 seconds, Putty will send a null packets to keep the connection open.

Be sure to set this value by default each time you launch Putty by following this post : Change Putty default settings

OpenSSH

If you are using OpenSSH (from a Linux machine or using WSL under Windows 10), you can change a settings for your user by editing the config file under the SSH directory in your home directory.

You can follow those steps :

  • Edit the config file
vi ~/.ssh/config
  • Add the settings to enable the keepalive
Host *
ServerAliveInterval 240
  • Set the following rights to the file
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config

With this setting, your client will send a keepalive packet each 240 seconds to the remote host.

Server side

On the server side, you can edit the SSH server configuration file. If you are using Debian it will be “/etc/ssh/sshd_config”.

First, uncomment the following line :

#ClientAliveInterval 0

Then replace the value 0 by 240, save the file and restart the service.

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