How to Reproduce a Silently Dropped Tcp/Ip Connection

How to reproduce a silently dropped TCP/IP connection?

Use Socat to forward your connection (it's very easy to set up as a TCP forwarder/proxy) even on the same machine if you want (by introducing a new port for the proxy to operate on and pointing it to the 'official' endpoint)

Check out the simple TCP forwarder example

Then when you want to test outages you can either kill it (and the socket will be closed) or potentially try stopping the process (CTRL Z linux) to see how your destination handles stalled connections.

Any questions? I'll try to answer... Good luck!

How long can a TCP connection stay open?

There is no limit in the TCP connection itself. Client and server could in theory stay connected for years without exchanging any data and without any packet flow. Problems are usually caused by middleboxes like NAT router or firewalls which keep a state and expire the state after some inactivity. Any new packets sent within the connection cannot be delivered then because no associated state exists anymore in the middlebox.

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