I had a problem once trying to ssh from work to my machine at home. Everything worked fine until I left the connection idle for a while. When I hit a key I got

Read from remote host www.caboteria.org: Connection reset by peer
Connection to www.caboteria.org closed.

Setting ssh's KeepAlive parameter on the client and server didn't seem to do much good. I found a patch that helped, though:

http://www.icl.isc.tohoku.ac.jp/~hgot/sources/openssh-watchdog.html

The "contributed" patch at the bottom is close to the version that ships with Debian Potato, and although it gives errors when you try to apply it it's pretty small and relatively easy to cut-n-paste by hand.

-- TobyCabot - 17 Oct 2001