ssh and shared connections

My job requires me to ssh into various boxes often, with several connections to the target host. Some people use screen on the target host but I work better if I have multiple terminal windows. But re-connecting to the same host can be annoying, a connection does take time and it should be instantaneous. Luckily, SSHv2 allows to share a connection, making reconnection a lot faster. Also, if you have password-authenticated connection instead of a key-based one you won't have to type the password for each new connection (but really, you should be using keys anyway). The few lines you'll need in your $HOME/.ssh/config:

ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/ssh_mux_%h_%p_%r
ControlPersist 60

All three are extensively described in the ssh_config(5) man page, but here's a summary:

• ControlMaster auto will create a new ssh connection when no matching socket exists. Otherwise, it will just use the existing connection.
• ControlPath is simply the path to the control socket, with %h, %p and %r being replaced with target host, port and username to keep the socket name unique. Having this in a user-specific location instead of /tmp is generally a good idea.
• ControlPersist defines how long the master connection should be kept open after exit. You can specify "yes" for indefinite or a number of idle seconds. If you reconnect within that idle time, it will again re-use the existing connection. Note that if you do not have ControlPersist and you quit the master connection, you will terminate all other connections too! ControlPersist was added in OpenSSH 5.6.

You can provide these options globally or inside a Host section of the config, depending on your needs. A few final notes: since you essentially only have one connection now, you can only forward one X11 display, one ssh agent, etc. at a time. If you need a separate connection for a otherwise shared host, use "ssh -S none". Also, if you're doing heavy data transfer on laggy connections you're probably better off having separate connections.