Keepalive message per channel in SSHv2

[Pankaj Bhagra <bhagra%cisco.com@localhost>]

Hi There,

I am not sure how to handle a keepalive message received on the client
side after the session is successfully established.

Scenario:

   Inhouse implementation of sshv2 client <----> SSH Secure Shell 2.3.0
Server

After the connection is established successfully between the inhouse
sshv2 client and SSH 2.3.0 server, the ssh client receive the following
message from the server side. 

62 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-15 6b 65 65 70 61 6c 69   b........keepali
76 65 40 6f 70 65 6e 73-73 68 2e 63 6f 6d 01      ve%openssh.com@localhost.

This is a SSH_MSG_CHANNEL_REQUEST (0x62) message for channel id 0 (0x
00000000), with a string len (0x15) "keepalive%openssh.com@localhost" and have a
want reply flag = TRUE. 

I have couple of questions related to this message:

1. Do we support per channel keepalive messages in sshv2 protocol ? I
couldn't find this specified in ietf drafts. any pointers ??

2. How to handle this request ?

3. To me this message is not from the SO_KEEPALIVE, if the above said is
true I couldn't find the generation of the message in the 2.3 code base,
could anyone xplain what is happening here. Is it mandated/suggested by
the protocol to support 2 kinds of keepalive, one at TCP level and
another at per channel ??

comments ??

later,
pankaj