Re: Stale connection?

["Chris B." <unixbigot@pobox.com>]

chris@grierwhite.com (Christopher J. White) moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> If I leave gnus up and running for a while, then check news
> (g from group buffer: gnus-group-get-new-news), it frequently
> hangs as if waiting for a timeout.  I've found, however, that
> if I go unplugged (J j), then plugged again (J j), then 
> check news, it is nice and fast.  Is this normal behaviour?
> If I leave gnus plugged for a significant time, is gnus
> keeping the connection open on my end but the server
> is terminating it, thus the long timeout?  Any way to have
> gnus automatically close the connection after a timeout
> and then re-establish it as necessary?

I get that happen to me, because I connect to the NNTP server through
a NAT firewall.

The firewall box flushes its NAT tables after, I think, 10 minutes of
inactivity, which can easily be the time it takes to compose a
detailed followup.

I habitually do "C-x 5 b *Group* ^ C-n C O C-x 5 0" (pull up *Server*
window, close and re-open NNTP connection) to recover from this state.

It would be real nice if there were an easier way to detect/recover
from stale NNTP connections.  (Yeah, the proper solution is to
eradicate NAT, which is evil and loathesome).

--cjb