Argo Tunnel with SSH is disconnecting

Zero Trust Cloudflare Tunnel
1

I’ve been testing Argo Tunnel with SSH and using it to login to servers behind our firewall. It works OK, but often disconnects when there is a network glitch or the screensaver on my Mac kicks it.

Is there a way to make Argo Tunnel maintain a persistent connection to my terminal? (I’m using Iterm2 on a Mac)

I’ve seen “connection closed unexpectedly” errors in the log and Argo Tunnel then reconnects. But it also disconnects my terminal connection.

I was using et (Eternal Terminal) to maintain persistent terminal connections and it works fine. Why can’t Argo Tunnel do the same thing? I know that dropping a connection on a web connection is not usually noticed (and is easily fixed with a refresh). However, on an SSH terminal connection it’s a major pain to have to relogin every time there’s a temporary glitch.

I tried to figure out how to make Argo Tunnel work with et, but it uses a different port (normally 2022). From what I can tell, Argo Tunnel only seems to work with port 22 (SSH) and 3389 (RDP). If there is a way to make it work with et on port 2022, that may solve my problem.

Does anyone else have this problem or have any suggestions?

2

I have the same issue with frequent disconnects with SSH over argo-tunnel. Can’t find a pattern for it. Did you find a solution for it?

3

I never found a solution. I just went back to connecting directly to my server with SSH.

My guess is that their system is optimized to handle web connections, which are not usually long-running. If CF needs to restart a tunnel, reboot a container or shift operations to a new server, it doesn’t much make much difference to a web browser connection. A simple refresh will fix the problem and most people will never notice.

However, this doesn’t work with SSH connections. I do most of my development work over SSH using vim, so I may have connections open for days (or weeks). If I have a critical session that can’t be interrupted by a lost connection, I use tmux. Then I can log back in and return to my original session.