I was looking for a client side keep alive since I do not have administrative access to all the machines I ssh in to.

Basically you create or edit the following file in your home directory:

and in this file you enter the following line:

Change the interval to whatever you like, I find once per minute is usually good enough and there does not seem to be any performance impact.

I found this tip at the following site:
http://madphilosopher.ca/2005/07/an-ssh-keep-alive-tip/