killing NAT timeouts, for fun and profit Options

[Guest_eltee_*]

Given a number of users are stuck behind annoying timeout prone routers these days (and unfortunately that the number of us are growing not shrinking) it would be nice to have a 'world' option to kill NAT timeouts.

This is pretty easily done by jus sending an empty packet to the connected world every x minutes. The packet, being empty, is discarded, but after it fools the NAT device into realizing the connection is still live.

A bonus (over using ##task) is that there is no indication its happened at all within the actual mu*. If you are idle 10 minutes and an empty packet is bounced, you are still idle 10 minutes. This helps by not leaving connections open indefinately (the mu* timeout will still apply) and lets people know when you are infact, idle.

Once something like this is in place, those of us with these routers will *NEVER* suffer another NAT timeout again. Not bad, ending months or nigh on years of frustration for lots of people with a single little quick change. ^.^

[Guest_eltee_*]

hmm I did it for something at work pc side by simply using a tcp 'send' where the actual data being sent was just "" (an empty string). Essentially it sends out a packet with no data in it whatsoever, just a header that passes thorugh the local router box out to the mu* and is promptly discarded at the os level as being a worthless packet, jus one of those every 10 minutes.

The local NAT router is fooled into thinking the connection is still live, and the mu* itself never actually sees the packet to interfere with idle times or send back any reply. In fact using it I do actually get disconnected *by* the mu* for inactivity after an hour if I do actually idle.

essentially it would be like setting a ##task 600 <null> where <null> was quite literally nothing