No open channels after timeout

[Jim Breton]

Howdy.  Trying to set up a persistent SSH connection from a remote host,
to my own machine with a LocalForward.

I am running the ssh process in the foreground so it can be maintained
by djb's daemontools to ensure that the connection stays open at all
times.

But, I am having a problem with the following command (even when run
manually from a shell):

ssh -N tarkin

where in ~/.ssh/config I have the following:

Host tarkin
	User username
	Protocol 2
	LocalForward 466 localhost:25
	IdentityFile /home/username/.ssh/id_dsa

This works fine without the -N option.. I can log into "tarkin" and get
a shell.

Using -N, this works only for a short period of time.  I can use the
locally-forwarded socket and the tunnel is successful.  But after a few
minutes pass, the connection closes and I get this message in syslog (on
the server):

sshd[28006]: Disconnecting: No open channels after timeout!

The client is FreeBSD-4.4 running OpenSSH 3.0.1p1, the server is OpenBSD
2.9 running OpenSSH 3.0.1.

Is there any way to keep a foreground SSH connection open like this?


I am also having a secondary issue with this connection but I believe
it's unrelated: the _first_ time I connect through the ssh tunnel, I get
the following in syslog:

sshd[16357]: error: socket: Protocol not supported

All following connections through the tunnel do not cause that error to
appear.  At first I thought perhaps it was a lack of IPv6 support but I
tried "telnet -4" on the client system and it didn't make any
difference, so I am assuming there is another problem.  Any ideas?  Not
critical, but just a nuisance and possibly a small bug.

-- 

Jim B.
vader at conflict.net