Idle connections dropping

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "J. Ryan Kelley" <ryan.kelley at trinitytransport.com>
Cc: "fplist2" <filepro-list at seaslug.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2006 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: Idle connections dropping


>
>
> Bob Rasmussen wrote:
>
>>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.
>>
>>
>
> Our agents use FacetWin, and I just did a breif scan through the 
> configuration settings and wasn't able to find a setting like this.  Does 
> anyone know if this can be easily accomplished in FacetWin?
>
> Thanks

Most of our users are using facetwin too and I can tell you for sure that
it's simly not an option in facetwin.
Nor does the facetwin server daemon have a heartbeat option. If the server
part did a heartbeat that would allow the server to detect lost connections
and send a hangup to all the child processes of that session, which would
cure the problem of headless runmenu's eating all the cpu and locked records
in clerks & reports.

I have explained these problems and asked for the features before. Maybe if
more people describe the problem to facetwin they will add the necessary
feature.
But I doubt it. They are, quite sensibly I have to admit, getting out of
terminal emulation and putting all their attention on FacetPhone. (An
excellent, heck awsome, product btw)

It's one of the reasons we are moving off facetwin ourselves after several
years of using it almost exclusively. (Our icon is even in the facetwin
installer for the last few years, the two trucks in the center of the
StartMeUp tab)

So far we've just had to fix the problem the hard way, by tracking down the
real source of the problem in each case.
That means getting the customer to get his local computer guy on site to
look through the routers options and try to find the idle session setting
and disable it, or install a different router that you know works the way
you need, physically look at the network to make sure there isn't some other
router or firewall box in the loop that might be doing it, calling up the
ISP etc...

Some people get knocked out when they're not even idle. That always entails 
fixing a poor lan on the remote site.
Including the physical wiring (replace anything less
than cat5, fix up wires in bad condition),  re-arranging the topology (try
to make one big star, reduce unnecassary cascading of switches, put any
servers directly on the main switch not on any cascaded switches, don't use
the switch thats built into the router except for one cable to a seperate
big switch, improve the make/model of the switch if it's one of the
exceptionally cheap-o's but even a linksys 4124 is fine), and delousing pc's
(clean out virii and adware and ensure all pc's have up to date antivirus)

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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