I’ve had an R710 at the foot of my bed for the past 4 years and only decommissioned it a couple of months ago. I haven’t configured anything but I don’t really notice the noise. I can tell that it’s there but only when I listen for it. Different people are bothered by different sounds maybe?
If the host you’re connecting to is already in your known_hosts, a malicious network can’t do anything but break the connection. If it tries to mitm the ssh connection, you’ll get the alert that’s someone could be “doing something nasty”.
Information leakage: Anything between you and the ssh server will be able to see that you’re connecting to a ssh server and how much data you transfer, but not what the data actually is.
Huh that’s interesting, thanks!