Re: [JDEV] Speaking of firewalls....

[Jeremie <jeremie@jabber.org>]

> A problem I ran into connecting to my jabber server from home is that our
> firewall times out idle connections after a period of time. The way I'm
> getting around this right now is sending a status message every 5 minutes if
> no traffic has been received from the server.

I've seen similiar things... many things like to drop idle TCP
connections, which seems naughty but it happens, so...

> Any thoughts to adding a ping/pong tag to the protocol?

Yes, many :)

It's going to need this for one primary reason, TCP doesn't know to drop
the connection when the other end "dissappears", such as a dialup
connection breaking and not disconnecting properly.  There is a built in
KEEPALIVE available for TCP connections, but vendor implementations are
way to flaky to make it useful.

TCP _does_ drop the connection if the server sends data though.
Apparently you can send NULL's, err, absolutely empty TCP packets that
will cause the normal two way TCP traffic over a connection.  But I
haven't tried it yet, so I don't know that for sure.  If it works as I
understand it, I'll have the server create this activity on the connection
at a regular interval.  This shouldn't require any changes on the clients
end of things.

> Also, I'm using <ext> within the <status> tags for some information specific
> to our product, but what I noticed is that the server escapes anything
> within the <status> even though it's the <ext> tag (I'm still running 0.5 as
> I haven't been able to get 0.6 to build yet).

Yes, that's a 0.5 thing(everything outgoing was escaped).  0.6 will allow
you to put normal XML tags inside the <ext></ext> and they will be passed
through as XML tags.

Jer