MushClient and firewall/routers

Hi all,

I've been using MushClient for quite some time, and it normally works fine. One bit of annoyance, however, is that often my windows will completely timeout on me, usually after as little as 5-10 minutes of idle activity. Since the MU*s I'm on all kinda frown on anti-idle scripts, and seeing as I've run into this issue on different versions of MushClient, and different brands/models of these routers, I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this, and perhaps has a solution?

I've tried firmware upgrades - no real change. This has occurred with both D-link and Linksys DSL Firewall/Router devices.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for any help ya'll can provide, in advance.

Most often the idle connections are a combination effect from the MU* and your router software. The most invisible fix Ive found to this is something Nick suggested on another similar thread - send a triggered 'who' or 'score' to the MU*. This hardly violates any botting rules and unless the MU* is on some seriously low end server, they'll never know the difference in bandwidth.

nods that's pretty much what I do.. I have aliases afkon/afkoff. When it's on it does a few things.. if anyone tells me something I have 2 triggers, one that sends the tell to notepad (append) so I can read it when I return, and the other just tells the person that I'm afk and their message has been logged. The afk mode also activates a timer that fires every 5 minutes and all it does is send 'look' to keep me from voiding on the mud (timing out). If the admin of the mud you play on are really that anal to not be ok with it, then if you're going to be afk for a long time just log off and save your char from aging heh.

Hi there. My knowledge on this subject is fairly rudementary, so I may be completely wrong about the following speculation:

First, I will refer you to this resource on the subject:

The page provides documention on TCP ICMP packets.

My speculation is this: Perhaps the mud, after failing to receive a packet from your machine for some time, makes an attempt to ping your computer. This might be a standard ICMP ping, as opposed to communication via the mud's standard port number. If you have ICMP communications shielded at your firewall, then the mud likely recieves no answer to the ping, and assumes you are no longer connected, thus ending the session.

Of course, if you block all ICMP packets, then you would probably notice similar effects in other software that uses standard pings to determine your 'alive' status.

You may get away with a script that just sends a blank line (newline) every 5 minutes. Assuming that stops the timeout, you can hardly be accused of running a bot by just hitting <enter>.

Probably make it check if there has been recent activity at the client end, or you may inadvertently answer a question on the MUD and take the default answer, if it has such things.