Manually breaking the connection is tolerable-but-annoying for interactive sessions. The place where this caused real problems for me is in my testing setup, w

Manually breaking the connection is tolerable-but-annoying for interactive sessions. The place where this caused real problems for me is in my testing setup, where I would have scripts do something like: ssh <host> "shutdown -h now ; exit" [wait for the machine to stop responding to pings] [wait for the machine to start responding to pings] [Do the next thing] ...and if it didn't shut down within a certain amount of time, or come back up within a certain amount of time, treat it as a failure. With ssh hanging: * If the shutdown/start again succeeds, then the "wait for it to stop responding to pings" happens after it's rebooted. * If the boot doesn't succeed, the whole system waits for ssh's timeout (which is quite large) before failing. EDIT: I should clarify, this issue has been fixed in Debian at least for a while; but I just tripped over it again when I was playing with an Ubuntu VM; maybe 16.04?