by Yesterday I tried connecting to one of my linux (x86) machines via ssh
and received the following error
Command terminated on signal 1.
and it kicked me right out.
After about a half hour of ripping out hair, I discovered that it was
caused by the fact I had the IdleTimeout set for 3d.
When I changed it to 2d or 4d everything was fine again. So I left it
at 4d. Then today I tried connecting again and got the same error. So
I changed it back to 3d and everything worked fine. So the next thing I
did was set the system date to 8/31 with a timeout of 30d and the same
thing happened. Then to test the pattern
on 9/30/98 an IdleTimeout of 60d
on 12/31/98 an IdleTimeout of 152d
on 03/31/99 an IdleTimeout of 242d
on 04/30/99 an IdleTimeout of 272d
.....i gave up testing after that...
I tried this experiment on 8 different x86 machines running linux and it
happened on all of them.
so anyone that uses the idletimeout in the sshd_config and gets that
error..you know what to change.
Even though it was kind of annoying not being able to get into my
account remotely at least it didnt exploit a security hole. This
problem happens on both redhat and slackware installations. I tried
running sshd on a sparc ultra-1 with solaris os to recreate the problem,
but it didnt happen, so it might be an x86 thing. If anyone has linux
installed on any other hardware platform (ppc, alpha, sun) and has sshd
installed or is willing to install it, it would be intersting to find
out whether or not this problem will happen on those hardware platforms.
I tested this using ssh-1.2.22 which is the current version
http://www.cs.hut.fi/ssh/#current-version