Persistent SSH session

[davidanthoff]

A lot of users of our Julia extension love the remote SSH features, they are super useful in a scientific research computing context!

One thing that has come up a lot lately, though, is that folks want an ability to have a persistent session on a server that they can disconnect from and then reconnect to way later.

The scenario is essentially something like this:

1. User connects to some remote server via the Remote SSH extension
2. They do some work
3. They get interrupted and close their local VS Code instance
4. They do something else for a couple of days
5. The now want to reconnect to the server, and ideally nothing was shut down on the server. For example, if they opened a REPL in step 2 and started a Julia instance in that REPL, it would still be running, and was never shut down. Similarly with pretty much all other runtime state they had.

I think this might be related to #440, but what I'm really asking for is not just an option to change the timeout, but some way to make the timeout infinit, so that the server session never shuts down.

This might also require some kind of UI, maybe a command like "Disconnect but keep server alive" or something like that, not sure.

[xgdgsc]

#1790 also related.

[EricChen1248]

Not a perfectly solution, but what about opening the terminal into Screen. Users could reconnected back to their screen session each time, also gives more fine grain control over resource releases (properly terminating a process vs an always persistent session)

[PavelSosin-320]

This is a well-known pattern in the Cloud Applications. The problem is always that lifecycles of Server and client are not synchronized and either server or client or connection can go down at any point all clients will hang. Then, clients have to re-authenticate. If the client is idle at the point of time was idle its user will have no knowledge of how to proceed. To avoid such a died-end situation client needs awareness of the "session status" i.e. Server needs session management and ability to report either current session status to the client, at least, by the explicit client's request or every re-connect request coming from the client has had session attribute. There is also a security risk that the session can be hijacked by anybody who has a valid login of the server when the client was idle.

[vscode-triage-bot]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 10 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vscode-triage-bot]

🙂 This feature request received a sufficient number of community upvotes and we moved it to our backlog. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!