[HECnet] netowrk flapping....

[Peter Lothberg]

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