[DGD] Sending telnet KEEPALIVE packets

[Tim Johnson]

What the MUD I'm on does is there's a pocketwatch item that you can buy that
will just beep every so often... it obviously seems totally useless to
everyone except a couple people who play from a school or college network.
Just sending a "your pocketwatch beeps" line to the player will be enough to
keep the connection open usually, and seems a bit safer than sending a
packet that might possibly crash some clients.  Elsewhere on another MUD I
noticed that when I come back from idle, there's stuff randomly indented, so
I assume they do a similar thing and just send me a space every 10 minutes
or something (I haven't enabled or opted in for anything like that, so I'm
just speculating).  Either of those will make my client flash to indicate
that I'm getting incoming text, so if you do something like that, making it
optional would be a good idea in case people care about their client
flashing when nobody's doing anything.

-Tim


On 7/20/07, Felix A. Croes <felix at dworkin.nl> wrote:
>
> "Kurt Nordstrom" <kurt at blar.net> wrote:
>
> > I've been asked by a user with a wonky connection if I could have the
> Mud
> > send them a periodic keepalive packet to avoid timing out.  I thought
> I'd
> > ask here about the best ways to do this.  I had a few questions:
> >
> > - Is the keepalive character something a stock DGD driver will allow to
> go
> > through, or am I gonna have to hack around in comm.c again?
>
> As far as I know, telnet does not actually have a "keepalive character".
> What is usually done is to send IAC NOP.  Some telnet clients can be
> configured to send this periodically, and DGD will do the proper thing
> in response, that is, it will ignore it.
>
>
> > - Assuming I can send it with the driver, how would I specify this
> > sequence in LPC?  Is there an escape code for it?
>
> DGD cannot send it.  Of course, you're free to modify comm.c to send
> periodical IAC NOPs; hopefully, not too many clients will crash as a
> result.
>
> Regards,
> Dworkin
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