[ANSWERED] mac client server connection drops frequently

when running indigo client and connecting to my home server across my home LAN, the connection drops a lot and i keep losing my state and having to reconnect.

for routine use, this is no big deal. my machine switches across different networks (home/work/public wifi/...) a few times a day and so it is not unexpected that when i leave the app unattended for a while, then come back to it, that i often have to wait for it to reconnect.

today for some reason, this problem is worse than normal and my connections are only staying up for about 30-60 seconds on average.

i assume the protocol used by indigo is based on TCP, so should be able to overcome low levels of packet loss, correct? is there a timeout or something that would cause the connection to timeout? i can't imagine this being the problem either, because i know in the past i've connected to my mac from outside the country without a problem. latency from my laptop running indigo client to my server is only 4-6ms (due to use of wifi). packet loss (measured by simple ping) is around .5% or less.

any ideas what might cause the connection to drop so often on a low-latency, medium-high reliability connection?

[matt (support)]

i assume the protocol used by indigo is based on TCP, so should be able to overcome low levels of packet loss, correct? is there a timeout or something that would cause the connection to timeout?

Yes, it does use a TCP connection. So low-level packet losses are handled by the TCP stack. If there is a drop that means the entire TCP socket connection was closed/dropped. That shouldn't normally happen. Your router might be dropping connections because its connection table is maxed out. They can also drop connections if they think one has gone idle. But the Indigo Server sends a heartbeat to the connected clients every second, so as long as your Mac is awake that shouldn't be a problem. You might try fiddling with those router settings though to see if it helps.

We can/should make Indigo more robust to automatically try a reconnect after a few seconds. It does sound though like something is occurring on your network/router that is causing the connection to be torn down when it shouldn't be.

i have had the same issue.Switching to a non 5 ghz network seemed to help.

i believe i've narrowed down the circumstances when the problem occurs, though i still don't know the exact cause.

i refer to my indigo server via DNS. i have dynamic DNS configured so that the resolver on my LAN returns a local address and an external resolver will resolve to the external IP of my router (which in turn is configured to do port-forwarding to my indigo server). i suspect this is fairly common style of config for those of us not using the prism reflector.

my experience has been that (mostly) indigo works when accessed from the LAN. it also works flawlessly (albeit somewhat more slowly) when accessed remotely - even from across continents via cellular/wifi and even crappy hotel-provided internet.

i've determined that the cases where i have trouble maintaining a connection seem to be cases where i was accessing the server using the external IP address from my LAN. this happens sometimes, for example, when i'm on the LAN but using an external DNS resolver such as when i've been using a VPN.

my understanding is that this (using external IP from the LAN) should work, though it entails extra trips through the NAT and port forwarding layers of my home router. the crux of the problem is that Indigo doesn't run well like this. indigo (client) on my mac will connect, and stay up for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, then disconnect (annoyingly, often when i'm in the middle of a complex edit of a script or something). then the connect dialog pops up.

at my home i have Verizon Fios server and use their ActionTec brand gateway/router device. i've heard that this device suffers from a small NAT table and has a few other "issues". the odd/unexplained part of this is that I never experience the problem when accessing from outside - so NAT and forwarding are obviously configured correctly and working fine in that case and working at least sometimes but not always in the case where packets are received on the LAN interface addressed to the IP of the WAN interface.

based on some ping tests i've done (and the fact that Indigo uses TCP), the problem does not seem to be related to routine packet loss.

anyway, i conclude that this problem likely doesn't have much to do with Indigo and more likely has to do with a glitch in how my router handles routing of its external interface IP from the LAN.

for some reason i don't seem to have the same problem with other services that also use port forwarding such as AFP and other web stuff - perhaps because they are just more tolerant of connections getting reset on the server side? i don't know for sure.

[jay (support)]

Thanks for the followup.

I also have connection drops from client to server over the local network using dns. (.local) the connection drops seem to happen every 15 min or so connected to a 5g wifi with a strong signal. I have had no other issues connecting to my servers locally or from the outside. The issue began after upgrading indigo client and server from 6.0.12 to 6.0.20.

[jay (support)]

Nothing about connection handling has changed since Indigo 6 was released, so I suspect the timing is just coincidence. Do you have a non 5GHz network to test on?

[matt (support)]

Most times these drops end up being a router issue, where it closes down TCP connections that it shouldn't be.