telnet session times out

I'm connecting from a Win2000 machine into a Linux Fedora Core 6
machine via telnet.
After a while of inactivity the telnet times out.
Connecting via telnet is a requirement. I cannot use other connection
tools
My questions:
1. How could I tell if the connection is closed by the server (Fedora
Core 6) or by the client (Win2000)
2. Where and how could I set the time out to infinite

Thanks,
Avner

On Aug 23, 10:04 pm, Avi <avner-moshkov...@shaw.ca> wrote:
> I'm connecting from a Win2000 machine into a Linux Fedora Core 6
> machine via telnet.
> After a while of inactivity the telnet times out.
> Connecting via telnet is a requirement. I cannot use other connection
> tools
> My questions:
> 1. How could I tell if the connection is closed by the server (Fedora
> Core 6) or by the client (Win2000)
> 2. Where and how could I set the time out to infinite
>
> Thanks,
> Avner


Hi Avner,

Is the Linux box remote?
Yes: I've seen this caused by a clients LAN router (sometimes this can
fixed in the router itself) timing out a session if there is no
activity. In the past people would use a ping to keep their dial-up
active way back before broadband. Several programs can ping the
server at periodic intervals, however Putty (freeware) can be
configured to easily ping every N seconds and can also be used as a
Telnet (and SSH) client.

If that didn't solve your issue you might be able to get away with
increasing the keepalive time on Linux:
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time (defaults to 1800. 30 minutes)

I'm certain someone more knowledgeable on here could describe what
tcp_keepalive_intvl and tcp_keepalive_probes do or googling.

Sentine| wrote:
> On Aug 23, 10:04 pm, Avi <avner-moshkov...@shaw.ca> wrote:
>> I'm connecting from a Win2000 machine into a Linux Fedora Core 6
>> machine via telnet.
>> After a while of inactivity the telnet times out.
>> Connecting via telnet is a requirement. I cannot use other connection
>> tools
>> My questions:
>> 1. How could I tell if the connection is closed by the server (Fedora
>> Core 6) or by the client (Win2000)
>> 2. Where and how could I set the time out to infinite
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Avner
>
>
> Hi Avner,
>
> Is the Linux box remote?
> Yes: I've seen this caused by a clients LAN router (sometimes this can
> fixed in the router itself) timing out a session if there is no
> activity. In the past people would use a ping to keep their dial-up
> active way back before broadband. Several programs can ping the
> server at periodic intervals, however Putty (freeware) can be
> configured to easily ping every N seconds and can also be used as a
> Telnet (and SSH) client.
>
> If that didn't solve your issue you might be able to get away with
> increasing the keepalive time on Linux:
> /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time (defaults to 1800. 30 minutes)
>
> I'm certain someone more knowledgeable on here could describe what
> tcp_keepalive_intvl and tcp_keepalive_probes do or googling.
>

If the high tech methods fail you you could run something like this to
generate innocuous traffic so you don't look idle:

while :; do echo "\000\c"; sleep 30; done &