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So my father has to deal with some vendors providing niche hardware and software solutions for a single department in the company.

Once the hardware finishes its work and transfers results to the managing PC, the PC has to upload those results to the server on the internet. The problem is that if no one's working with that setup for a few minutes the software in the PC can no longer communicate with the server.

Naturally, since idle time is in the equation, I thought of SO_KEEPALIVE (or whatever it's called in Windows). Wireshark confirms the absence of keepalive packets. However, the app doesn't seem to have any means to enable it... Hence the need to work with support guys.

One would expect the support to be professional, experts considering anything related to the app.

One would NOT expect to receive a call: "Hey, look, I was doing some googling on the internet... You might be right, enabling KA might help with the issue. We were discussing with our engineers and we tried to find some application that could enable KA on your computer. We couldn't find anything, but we believe that's the way to go. So give it a try and try to find some app on the internet that enables KA for our proprietary application". // everything in Lithuanian ofc.

I mean...seriously...?
I was startled to hear this suggestion. Since I expected them to be experts I assumed there's something IDK about Windows sockets -- could Windows enable KA globally, by-default? Did not find such a thing. Could Windows allow application A to control application B's socket options? Frankly, I'm too afraid to even look for this. I dislike Windows already. If this turned out to be true I'd probably become an anti-windows evangelist.

Comments
  • 0
    I'm hesitant to suggest such a simple approach because I think I'm missing something, but what about running a ping in the background?
  • 2
    @Root ping (ICMP) will not prevent NAT/FW from closing TCP sessions that have been idle for too long.
  • 0
    The question is: Why the fuck is that incompetent-piece-of-shit-vendor software reusing a socket or connection that might have been idle for God knows how fucking long instead of initiating a new session when new results are processed?
  • 0
    @ReverendLovejoy Today I found that the setup is Chinese. At least the app/driver part... Soooo... guess the guy has no clue as well -- just a middleman providing services based of Chinese tech they have no clue about inner workings of...
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