time out

[Venkat_28]

Users connected remotely are complaining about time out errors, We've never had this before.

It seems connection drops out after a while. I ping'ed default gateway and it's going fine. Could you suggest what needs to be checked?

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Check the environment variable TMOUT

If its set, you may wish to set it higher.

You may also want to see if timeout is configured in the applications your user is using.

lastly

look at /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log for clues

SEP

[Venkat_28]

I don't see much in syslog except this

auths-passwd-pam: ssh-pam-client returned packet SSH_PAM_OP_ERROR. (err_num: 9, err_msg: Authenticatio
n failed)

The remote users disconnected even while using secure shell.

TMOUT is 0 on the box here. Will just "SET TMOUT=20" do?

Any thing I should check in lanadmin?

Thank you

[Venkat_28]

Hello,

I can ping the remote system. What command will tell me the ips of routers/gateways and firewalls btween this system and remote system?

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

To check the route between your system & the remote ip, try traceroute.

/usr/contrib/bin/traceroute remote_ip

You can check the firewall setting and see if the connection is getting dropped out due to firewall. Firewall may have a rule to drop the connection after certain period of inactivity.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Mel Burslan]

I second Sanjay's opinion. Especially if you are working in a secure computing environment, like finance, defense industry etc, there is something called Sarbanes-Oxley initiative going on, and one part of the initiative touched us in my data center is, to secure the connections after certain time of inactivity. Yours sound more like this type of disconnection.

Previously, I worked in financial software development and hosting environment and I know for sure that there was 30 minutes of inactivity allowance otherwise, router killed your connection. Not a good way but it works for security purposes.

Check with your network/firewall/security folks in your establishment.

[Bill Hassell]

The shell timeout value is TMOUT and if it is zero, the shell will never timeout. DON'T set TMOUT=20 because the shell will then exit after 20 seconds. It's more common to set TMOUT=3600 (1 hour). Now this does NOT mean that a user will be disconnected in an hour. It means that the user must be at a shell prompt and type nothing on the keyboard for an hour. Then the shell will give a 1 minute warning and then exit.

That's probably not what your users are seeing. If users are connected remotely via modem or Internet, you'll need to verify that their ISP connection is not disconnecting automatically. DSL and cable modem operators sometimes disconnect for a few seconds every few hours, even if you're busy doing things. Web pages can survive this behavior but a telnet session cannot. You'll have to spend a lot of time collecting the reports, matching the ISP's that cause the most problems and go to them asking questions about disconnects.

[rick jones]

If you have one of those evil, end-to-end breaking things known as firewalls :) they can have idle connection timeouts.