A number of autossh connections are already left open for
port-forwarding Munin ports; autossh starts the connections and
ensures that they are automatically restarted if they are severed.
However, this represents a missed opportunity. Nagios's monitoring
uses a large number of SSH connections to the remote hosts to run
commands on them; each of these connections requires doing a complete
SSH handshake and authentication, which can have non-trivial network
latency, particularly for hosts which may be located far away, in a
network topology sense (up to 1s for a no-op command!).
Use OpenSSH's ability to multiplex multiple connections over a single
socket, to reuse the already-established connection. We leave an
explicit `ControlMaster no` in the general configuration, and not
`auto`, as we do not wish any of the short-lived Nagios connections to
get promoted to being a control socket if the autossh is not running
for some reason.
We enable protocol-level keepalives, to give a better chance of the
socket being kept open.
Alex Vandiver