Session Multiplexing

Although the OpenSSH client supports session multiplexing as of version 3.9, I understand that the server offers the support for some time. It allows several logins to share the same session and therefore the same login credentials. You will not have to authenticate everytime you open a session.

Session multiplexing can be implemented on the command line or in your ~/.ssh/config. The first session you create is set up as a master with a dedicated control socket. All consecutive sessions will only need to be supplied the control socket to share the same session as the master.

For the master session, it is quite useful to push the SSH client into the background as demonstrated in background SSH:

$ ssh -fN myhost-master
...
$ ssh myhost
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