Our team runs a lot of Jenkins jobs using Publish over SSH. Many of them use long-running SQL queries and all timeouts in Publish over SSH have been disabled. However, we are running into server SSH inactivity timeouts, set as ClientAliveInterval 1500 in /etc/ssh/sshd_config for security reasons.

One workaround we tried is to configure server-alives on a client side of the Jenkins server in ~/.ssh/config of the Jenkins user:

Host *
ServerAliveInterval 120
ServerAliveCountMax 30
ConnectTimeout 30

This approach did not work. What worked is a wait/print loop in every remote script that needs to be executed. It works like this:

# Run the main script
Technical/Template_Job/template.sh &
pid=$!

# Wait on a background job completion. Query status every 10 minutes.
declare -i elapsed=0
# `ps -p ${pid}` works on macOS and CentOS. On both OSes `ps ${pid}` works as well.
while ps -p ${pid} >/dev/null; do
  sleep 1
  if (( ++elapsed % 600 == 0 )); then
    echo "Waiting for the completion of the main script. $((elapsed / 60))m and counting ..."
  fi
done

# Return the exit code of the terminated background process. This works in Bash 4.4 despite what Bash docs say:
# "If neither jobspec nor pid specifies an active child process of the shell, the return status is 127."
wait ${pid}

This works, but it's a hassle to be adding wait/print loops into each script we execute. It'd be very nice if Publish over SSH supports periodic server-alive messages or some other option to suppress server inactivity timeouts.