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SubjectHow do I detect abruptly broken connections? [when other ends lose their modem connection to their ISP]
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I have a few users who are located in what is probably TCP/IP hell...
India. Their mean time to carrier loss is about 6 minutes during the day,
and they can sometimes hold the line for a whopping 2-3 hours after around
midnight.

So... I used to provide POP3 service via UW-Pine 4.1's POP3 package -
only, the sudden and unpredictable disconnections would leave stuck
sockets [and POP3 processes] sometimes for quite some time [which with the
UW-Pine package, locks the user out of his mailbox]. I've since changed
pop3 server to one which is designed for security first and foremost
anyhow [Solar Designer's lean and mean popa3d]. It has more aggressive
timeouts in the code, which I keep set pretty low [2 minutes].

In addition to POP3, I provide a special sendmail port for these users to
make use of, which ends up connecting to a customised redir program run
out of inetd.

About 2 times out of 3, the redir process times out rather than properly
closing. [The mail transfer succeeds, so it's clear that the entire
connection succeeds and closes otherwise normally, but the client may not be
properly closing the SMTP connection at the "end" of the transaction. The
Indian client is using Outlook Depressed 4.5 [for Macintosh]]. I don't care
too much about that, but it's an interesting data point.

My question is this:

In perusing the code for lots of networking daemons and such, when they
call select(), I rarely if ever see a list of FDs passed to the
"exceptions" part of select() [the third parametre, after the writefd
list]. Would passing an fdlist to the exceptions parametre provide for
more readily detected socket faults? [Naturally, I'd have to add some
code to check the exceptionsfdlist and handle any FD_ISSET's
appropriately.]

I would like to be able to detect broken sockets with more reliability and
less ambiguity. Lots of daemons seem to "handle" it by just setting a
timeout (either passed to select() or via an alarm() mechanism). This
seems kludgey to me - and besides, if I turn down my timeouts this way too
low, I run the risk of blowing connections that have short-term low
performance.

What can I do to allow two-way socket communications to reliably detect
when the other end has "died"? I can't alter the actual data protocol
since these are well-established and well outside of my jurisdiction to
control [SMTP and POP3]. What do you guys suggest?

Are there kernel tuning parametres that would enable this to be done more
easily? Would turning down keepalive intervals accomplish this? (and
ensuring that the sockets have SO_KEEPALIVE on) - are keepalives sent over
"active" connections [connections which are actually "flowing" and
receiving ACK packets]? I'd hate to diminish bandwidth by jamming my
outbound network traffic with needless keepalive traffic. The kernel has
it set to 2 hours by default - I have the bad feeling that keepalives
aren't best done too often.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. I'd like a "proper" solution
rather than alarm-timeouts/etc.

At the moment, the bandaids have solved the problems - but in a wider
scope of things, I'd like to solve the real problem. Timeouts to me, are
to handle "idleness" and the like. I would personally prefer to know the
difference between a "broken link" and a timeout.

One other thing... I have wu-ftpd-2.6.0 configured to use keepalives,
however, they never seem to kill broken links either. The ftpd processes
wait for the master timeout to die (which is implemented as an alarm
interrupt). What's the deal? Has SO_KEEPALIVE truly been deprecated to
dysfunctionality in the kernel at some point? If not, how do I actually get
it to work? I don't have the freedom to change the ftp/smtp protocols, so
whatever solution there is, it can't really alter those protocols. I *DO*
recall when doing some i/o on a Solaris machine to unreliable end-points, it
would pretty reliably detect broken sockets with code that was compiled
pretty stock. (I didn't have kernel/root access on the machines, and I
didn't do any tweaking of any kind).

Thanks,
=Rob=

PS: Linux 2.2.13+SolarD's no-stack-exec, libc5 (began life as slack4), and
I'm behind a firewall which allows connections to the appropriate ports.

PPS: I'd appreciate a cc: on any replies.
--
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