Reusing ssh connections

2020-02-05 - How to speed up opening multiple ssh to a single host
Tag: Toolbox

Introduction

It is possible to share multiple sessions over a single connection. One of the advantages is that for the duration of the connection, all new sessions open very fast.

How to

You need a directory to store the sockets for the opened sessions, I use the ~/.ssh/tmp directory for it. Whatever you choose, make sure it exists by running mkdir now. Then add these two lines at the start of your ~/.ssh/config :

ControlMaster auto
ControlPath   ~/.ssh/tmp/%h_%p_%r