One of the most impressive SSH tricks I've seen is the ControlMaster option. It saves your authentication information on a per-(user, host) basis, which lets you share one connection among multiple ssh/scp/rsync commands and TRAMP sessions. This is less useful if you use passwordless keys or ssh-agent (please use ssh-agent), but becomes much more useful if the host you connect to doesn't support key-based auth.
# multiplex connections to one host
ControlMaster auto
# where is that file
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p
Other useful things in my .ssh/config, check the manpages before you use them:
# use compression
Compression yes
# really really compress it
CompressionLevel 9
# forward X stuff
ForwardX11 yes
# yes, really forward X stuff
ForwardX11Trusted yes
For reasons others on this thread have outlined, ControlMaster is often more trouble than it's worth for general-purpose SSH usage. However for use in automated tools, it's a lifesaver. I use it extensively in doo for that exact reason:
I have a pretty awesome script that uses control-master to allow me to type the password in once and then preform a bunch of actions. The script specifically is for boot strapping ssh authorized keys on boxes that can't be on puppet.
I'd rather use ssh-agent for day to day work but this is a useful trick for scripting.
The behavior I've seen is that when you log out, the process doesn't end until all other clients to the connection have exited. I've observed what you describe if I then ^C it.
The way I usually do it is by opening something over TRAMP before opening any other ssh windows. That way, Emacs will handle the connection maintenance and I don't really need to see that it's up. If it dies, I just try saving something and it'll re-establish the connection.
If you don't use Emacs, you can always just start a dummy connection first and minimize/disown it.
> CompressionLevel 9
Just one note regarding the above line: this only works with SSH version 1. This functionality was removed in version 2 of the protocol (in the newer version there is only a single default compression level).
