[HECnet] netowrk flapping....

With my connection, I noticed that the circuit would disconnect and reconnect periodically. It corresponded to the timeout in my firewall causing the UDP association to be lost. When I increased the timeout in my firewall for these port 700 UDP "connections", that made my circuit much more stable. Like Peter said, Peter and I had a big debate about this at lunch today. UDP is, by definition (or so I thought), both stateless and connectionless. I can't understand what state or connection is being timed out in this case.... Yes, a UDP session is connectionless, however when a firewall is doing NAT and/or PAT (remember I mentioned that my firewall is randomizing the source port number, so the LAN port numbers are different from the ones sent over the internet), it needs to maintain a session table to keep track of which IP addresses and port numbers map to which systems and port numbers locally. Those connections time out after a while, and then subsequent UDP packets wouldn't be recognized. Any chance this device can be replaced with something IP compatible? (What's the uplink interface?) --P