Idle connections dropping

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, J. Ryan Kelley wrote:

>
> In the recent weeks, we've had more and more users who access our system from
> offices across the country complain to us that they have idle connections drop
> after 5 minutes.  We have our server set up to kill idle connections after 45
> minutes, and when these folks call us up we can still see their connections
> (that they say have dropped) as active on the server.  So we know that the
> issue does not exist on our server, but at the same time, we don't want to
> leave these folks out in the dark to fend for themselves and hope that they
> can find their own solution.  I figure that this has to be a fairly common
> issue, and was hoping that someone could shed some light on possible solutions
> to the problem.  The users are on different ISPs, using different routers, and
> are located all across North America.  We've tried things such as upgrading
> router firmware, which has worked for one user, but has been unsuccessful for
> all of the others.  Any suggestions or comments are welcome!  We're running FP
> 5.0.13R4 on Solaris 8.

An idle timeout canbe imposed by various components on the system, even by
an ISP. The usual solution, assuming this is a telnet or SSH connection,
is to configure the telnet or SSH client to issue a null packet every x
seconds. Most client software allows this. In Anzio, our telnet/SSH
software, it is configured under Communicate:Network:Stayalive.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
          voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
            fax: (US) 503-624-0760
            web: http://www.anzio.com