autossh for Debian README ========================= autossh is wrapped to choose a random port or fall back to 21021 the real binary is /usr/lib/autossh/autossh In this version of autossh the commandline switch -M overrides AUTOSSH_PORT environment, as opposed to default upstream behaviour (see http://bugs.debian.org/238150#msg6 and following) Note: if your ssh client/server version is recent enough you can obtain similar behaviour by setting ClientAliveCountMax and ServerAliveInterval in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. See sshd_config(5).