SFTP and SSH Timeout

Andrew — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:53:22 +0000

I bought a new router the other day, I was having some odd problems with my current one and thought it’d be nice to move to an 802.11n router. I picked up a Netgear WNDR3700, my first foray into Netgear products. Overall I’m pretty happy with the router except for one extremely annoying problem… it’s been timing out on my SFTP and SSH connections after just a 5-10 minutes. I’m regularly working on a file directly off an SFTP connection and I often go more than 10 minutes between saving or interacting with the server. Transmit gets kind of hung up with that happens and if you’re trigger happy on closing a window, you can end up losing your file altogether (not cool). Suffice it to say, that happened yesterday and I had to quickly rewrite the code while I could remember the gist of it, and prompting me to get this annoyance straighted out.

I presume the problem I was having was related to the new router timing out the NAT tables more frequently than my old router and not doing anything with my requests after it timed out the connection. Unfortunately, I could not find any settings in the router configuration to adjust this interval, however it was an extremely easy fix in Mac OS and it solved the problem for me with both SSH and Transmit.

The Fix
To fix the SFTP and SSH timeout problem in Mac OS, go to your home folder and look for a folder with the name .ssh (note it will be hidden in Finder, I just used Terminal). Inside the folder you probably already have a known_hosts file, and you may or may not have a config file, I did not. Create or modify the config file, including the following code, taking care to make certain you indent the second line:
Host * ServerAliveInterval 240

This should tell your computer to keep the ssh connection alive every 240 seconds (4 minutes). You can adjust this number as you see fit, as long as it’s lower than your router’s NAT timeout, it will resolve the problem.

NOTE: You will have to do this on every computer you’re using with the router. I was hoping to fix it on the router itself and not have to deal with it, but this is certainly better than nothing.

Double Line Stroke in Illustrator

Andrew — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:23:29 +0000

My girlfriend, the darling over at Spleen Chronicles, was lamenting the lack of line styles in Illustrator today, specifically the ability to put a double-line stroke on a path. I being a big fat cheater, gave her a way to get the effect she was looking for at the expense of the inside area between the two lines not being transparent. After the break you’ll find my walkthrough for the double-line stroke, screenshots are from Illustrator CS4, but it is possible to achieve the same effect in CS3 and perhaps earlier.

Step 1

To start off, draw a line with the pencil tool or create a shape.

Step 2

Increase the width of the stroke to accomodate the width of both lines plus the gutter between them, I used 5pt.

Step 3

Next you need to add a second stroke to the line to serve as the gutter. Click the Add New Stroke button (1), then change the color of the stroke to match your background (2), and set the width to the width you want the gutter (3). You should now have the appearance of a double line stroke!

Step 4 (optional)

If you’re noticing and annoyed by a faint line at the end, you can change the cap on the gutter stroke to a round cap and it will disappear.

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SFTP and SSH Timeout

Double Line Stroke in Illustrator