Connection to server lost without traffic

Technical Support & Bugs
1

I’m seriously doubt this is a Vassal issue, but I’m hoping someone has an idea what might be causing it and how to fix it, because it makes it very difficult to use the program, and fixing it would be terrific.

When there’s no activity for a few minutes (moving things back and forth, rolling dice, and the like stop this from happening) I disconnect from the server. People I’m playing with can see it happen, but I don’t see anything happen until I try to interact with something again, at which point I get a ‘lost connection to server’ message and see myself disconnected. I have similar issues with mIRC and dominion.isotropic.org.

Does anyone have any leads? I’ve worn through my limited computer problem capabilities, but I’m hoping someone has any idea what might be causing it.

Thanks!

2

I am going to make an extremely uneducated guess that this is due to a NAT timeout on your router. If so, that is basically a bummer, because I don’t think many routers will allow you to change the timeout interval.

Now, you might be able to do something very clever with SSH tunneling, and the SSH V2 ‘ServerAliveInterval’ option.

3

Well, the NAT timeout thing seems pretty reasonable, after looking at support sites for my router (A dlink DIR-615), which said that the timeout in the firmware is set lower than it claims to in the manual, so thanks for that lead!

If it’s not too much trouble, could you explain the SSH tunneling thing? It seems like the only option I have, and I’m not sure what it means or how to do it.

4

This used to happen to me all the time too with a D-Link DIR-615. I ended up putting my PC in the DMZ and it stopped.

Try it, just be sure your firewall and virus scanner are active.

5

Well, I don’t know that it would work, just a thought off the top of my head. Basically, you would need a server somewhere that allows SSH connections, and then you would run your programs through that. You would get more reliable information about SSH tunneling from a search engine than you would from me - it’s been a while since I’ve done anything like that.
It’s also quite likely that in order to do that, you would need to know enough about which ports you’ll be using that you could just make port forwarding rules instead. This would avoid the NAT timeout problem by reserving those ports for your computer all the time rather than just ‘some period of time after you start using them’.
And yeah, the DMZ should work if indeed your router is the issue. Bit drastic, if you can avoid it.