mysterious freeze when doing ssh to a remote machine

[carbon]

i have icq running off a screen at my home gentoo machine, so when i ssh to my home machine from work and do a screen -r icq, icq comes back up as usual.

but the problem is, the terminal that i use to ssh back home will freeze for no reason. i ssh again and the screen stay attached by that "dead" ssh (i know that by doing ps auxf) , so i have to kill that ssh thread and ssh again, if i do that, icq will come up as usual.

screen and icq didnt crash, so it gotta be the ssh or my terminal program.

any clue?

[eee]

I was experiencing similar problems with my ssh due to inactivity or a bad connection or a combintation of both. I was able to resolve it by installing the Debian ssh client, which has a patch for ProtocolKeepAlives, which I set to 100. No more dropped connections after that.

The Debian ssh package is located at:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/ssh.html

From the man page:

ProtocolKeepAlives
Specifies the interval in seconds at which IGNORE packets will
be sent to the server during idle periods. Use this option in
scripts to detect when the network fails. The argument must be
an integer. The default is 0 (disabled), or 300 if the
BatchMode option is set.