How to change the default timeout of internet connection?

Question

I have an AIR 2.0 application which makes a request to the server which can take more than 1 minute. Sadly due to this bug the request timeouts after 30 seconds. There is a workaround, but is only available for Windows. Could you tell me how to do the same thing in Ubuntu 10.04?

Answer 1

If I understand it correctly this command will make the same thing on linux that this registry tweak in windows:

sudo sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout=100

Where 100 is the timeout in seconds to forcibly close a socket. Note that:

• Default value in Ubuntu is 60 seconds, not 30.
• This will be enforced by the kernel. So it can have some effect in other apps. I expect them only if you lower it, but who knows.
• I can't understand how can this be related to that bug in AIR.

From the tcp man page:

tcp_fin_timeout (integer; default: 60) This specifies how many seconds to wait for a final FIN packet before the socket is forcibly closed. This is strictly a violation of the TCP specification, but required to prevent denial-of-service attacks. In Linux 2.2, the default value was 180.