Re: conntrack, idle TCP connection and keep-alives

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On Sun, 27 Oct 2013, Patrick McHardy wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 06:01:30PM +0000, Patrick McHardy wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 08:34:09AM -0700, Phil Oester wrote:
> > > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 12:14:48AM +0400, WGH wrote:
> > > > It seems that, when masquerading, conntrack silently drops idle
> > > > connection after nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_established seconds. This's
> > > > pretty terrible, as application inside the network, if it never sends
> > > > anything, will never know that connection was dropped.
> > > 
> > > If this is a problem for you, then increase nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_established
> > > to an insanely high value.  You do realize, of course, that the conntrack
> > > table has a finite number of entries.
> > >  
> > > > RFC 5382 gives us a solution to this:
> > > > > A NAT can check if an endpoint for a session has crashed by sending a
> > > > > TCP keep-alive packet and receiving a TCP RST packet in response.
> > > > 
> > > > However, it I couldn't find such feature in netfilter. It would be
> > > > pretty nice to have.
> > > 
> > > Keepalives should be done in the application, not in the firewall.
> > 
> > Actually I think its a pretty nice idea to reduce breakage introduced
> > by NATs. There a millions of embedded devices that use very small timeout
> > values to reduce memory usage, at the cost of frequently breaking idle
> > connections.
> 
> The downside seems to be that we'd need to keep track of timestamp values
> to send valid keepalives, which also costs extra memory. I don't think that
> cost is justifiable for NAT keepalives alone.

I think a single flag could be sufficient: if the timer in conntrack goes 
off and the entry is in the ESTABLISHED state and this flag is not set, 
then send a TCP keepalive packet and start the timer with a short timeout. 
If we receive the reply packet, then the long ESTABLISHED timeout value 
can be restored and the flag cleared.

Best regards,
Jozsef
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