How to Wake Up a Remote Gnome Session that has Gone Black

If you are remotely using Gnome (e.g., using Cygwin) and leave it running for a while, its screensaver will switch into power saving mode, and no movement of the mouse, or typing on the keyboard will wake it up. I have had this happen several times and, until recently, my only solution was to close the session, and start a new one. This is very undesirable if you are in the middle of a long process such as updating to the latest Debian distribution (Hint: don't use Gnome for this, but log in via a plain ssh shell). It is possible to "wake up" a remote Gnome session by killing the screen saver. This is done as follows:

• Log in to the server via ssh as root from the remote machine (replace server-url with the URL or IP address of the server):

ssh root@server-url

• Kill the screen saver:

killall gnome-session

NOTE: I do not know if the screen saver is disabled permanently until the next restart. However, it would be best to disable the screen-saver altogether so that this problem never occurs.