Forums Connection Issues Working DCC chat times out since router added

My friend recently added a Linksys WRT54G2 router to her configuration, and had the usual router DCC issues, so I talked her through setting up port forwarding, and we can now DCC send and chat.

However, if we have a DCC chat open for (exactly) 10 minutes without saying anything, it closes. This is very irritating and I can't work out how to prevent it, or why it's happening.

I've gone through various descriptions of the DCC protocol and can't see anything about time-outs, keep-alives etc, so I am guessing mIRC decides a DCC is dead under certain conditions and closes it.

Does anyone know why or how this happens, and how we can prevent it?

Did you try set a timer that sends something true the DCC chat every xx minutes? see if that helps.

It sounds like one (or both) of you have a script loaded that closes idle chat sessions after 10 minutes?

A timer would mean we'd be spamming each other every 10 minutes, but thanks for the suggestion.

Neither of us have any scripts closing idle sessions. We've been chatting for 4 years and never had this problem until she got the router.

Maybe something in her router then? i don't use a router so cant tell. But if it's every 10 minutes when you idle, then she can look for anything that have that interval. Then just test uncheck it and see if it helps.

If the connection type is PPPoE (DSL), see the Connect on Demand: Max Idle Time setting on your router's basic setup page. Example here.

Thanks RoCk, unfortunately she's on cable and using DHCP. Great link, I wish I'd had that when I was talking her though the router setup, instead of squinting at the blurry screenshots in the manual PDF.

We solved it, I'll post the solution in case other people with the same problem come looking.

The router seems to tear down inactive sockets after 10 minutes, perhaps to keep the NAT table tidy. This can be fixed with keepalives, and mIRC DCC does enable them, but in Windows they default to being sent every 2 hours. Here's how to change that:-

1. In regedit, to go HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

2. Click Edit| New | DWORD Value

3. Name the new value KeepAliveTime

4. This is the number of seconds between the sending of keepalives, so just set it to any value under 10 minutes. We went for 570 (23A in hex).

5. Reboot. Solved!

Thanks for taking the time to share the solution.