I've been staying at a hotel for the last few days, and having lots of problems with the internet service here.

At home, at Sea-Tac, at the Las Vegas airport (I'm not in Vegas now unfortunately), and at the office I have had no problems keeping an SSH tunnel open for an indefinite period of time. Like, all day, or for as long as I want. Unfortunately, if I open an SSH tunnel from the hotel, it gets screwed up after a few minutes of use. It doesn't matter if I use wireless or ethernet, I have the same problem.

After a few minutes, data sent across the tunnel is lost and the connection stops working. If I wait long enough I get the error message "Read from remote host myhost: Operation timed out" and ssh terminates, but the tunnel stops working long before that happens.

So, even though I'm leaving in the morning, and I've been here a few days, I decided to call tech-support. After the preliminaries he asks "What seems to be the problem?"

"I'm having problems keeping an SSH connection open for more than a few minutes."

The answer... "What is an SSH connection?"

Ugh.

"Um, forget it. Bye."

Why do I even bother?