autossh – Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels

FEATURES

• autossh is a program to start a copy of ssh and monitor it, restarting it as necessary should it die or stop passing traffic. The idea is from rstunnel (Reliable SSH Tunnel), but implemented in C.
• The author’s view is that it is not as fiddly as rstunnel to get to work.
• Connection monitoring using a loop of port forwardings or a remote echo service.
• Backs off on rate of connection attempts when experiencing rapid failures such as connection refused.
• Compiled and tested on OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Cygwin, and AIX; should work on other BSDs.
• Freeware.