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Date:      Mon, 03 Jun 2002 16:35:31 -0400
From:      Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
To:        Roman Jasin <cityangels@mac.com>
Cc:        Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: connection drops after some time
Message-ID:  <3CFBD313.7060902@potentialtech.com>
References:  <AF8538DE-7721-11D6-8349-00039345B18A@mac.com>

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Roman Jasin wrote:
> Thanks Chris,
> 
> I guess that's what I'll have to do. You wouldn't believe how 
> incompetent some ISPs can be here (Latvia). I probably spend hours on 
> the phone trying to get them to check whether they have a timeout setup.

I feel your pain.  I've worked for some people like this, and occasionally,
I've just fixed the problem when the boss' back was turned, despite the
fact that he had specifically told me not to. :(
Hopefully, the suggestion I give below will help you fix things.
As far as the ISPs in Latvia being incompetent, I'm sorry, but there are
some in the US who are just as bad (if not worse).

> On Monday, June 3, 2002, at 09:34 PM, Chris Fedde wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 3 Jun 2002 20:06:39 +0300  Roman Jasin wrote:
>>  +------------------
>>  | I guess the problem is my ISP, but I'm not sure about that. Plus those
>>  | guys aren't very helpful, so I'm hoping to fix it w/o them. It 
>> proved to
>>  | be the fastest path in the past.
>>  |
>>  | Here is what happening with my FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE box, running Apache,
>>  | sshd, and sendmail. It becomes inaccessible from outside world after
>>  | less than an hour if I'm not doing something on it. As soon as I 
>> access
>>  | something from it, whether via http or simple  ping, it comes back
>>  | online and you can see it from the outside. It looks like it forgets
>>  | ISP's default router address. APM is not an issue simply because it's
>>  | disabled. I tried everything, even replacing the NIC and the box 
>> itself.
>>  | I'm on RadioDSL with BreezeAccess antenna, and like I said I don't 
>> have
>>  | problems with the accessing Internet. The problem is that the outside
>>  | world can't 'see' my server if I don't access the Internet from it 
>> for a
>>  | while.
>>  | Hope it makes sense.
>>  |
>>  | Any help is very appreciated,
>>  +------------------

I worked for an ISP for a while that had the same problem with his servers.
It turned out that the recycled old switching hub that he was using had an
option to protect the network from broadcast storms and other broadcast
traffic attacks.  Unfortunately, the method it used was to calculate the
percentage of traffic that was broadcast, and when that percentage got too
high, temporarily disconnect the machines receiving the broadcasts from the
network.  This resulted in the machines being disconnected during slow times
when the only network traffic was Windows NetBIOS broadcasts.  Luckily, the
hub had an option to turn this "feature" off.
You didn't specify your network and other hadware setup.  This may be something
on your end, or it may be the ISPs hardware.  If the latter, you may have
trouble getting it handled if the ISP is as tough to work with as you claim.

>> An obvious work around is to put something that tickles the net into
>> crontab:
>>
>>     */20 * * * * ping -c 3 www.myisp.com > /dev/null 2>&1
>>
>> But that does not address the "real" problem.  I suspect that it is a
>> policy issue on the ISP or layer2 provider that is timing out your DSL
>> virtual circuit.

We used this solution for some time.  It seemed like an unholy hack of a
half-a$$ed solution, but it worked.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technology
http://www.potentialtech.com


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