I have a scenario where long-idle sessions of TOADSoft client communication with the Oracle server seem to be torn down as they timeout on an intermediate state-full firewall.

These sessions could be idle for multiple hours!
It is not acceptable to increase the timeout on the firewall globally and
of course, it does not support longer timeouts for specific flows.

I have fixed this problem for PuTTY idle connections;
it allows a configurable keep-alive.

But, I have not yet identified any such support in the TOAD software.

Looking up a bit on system-wide configurations, I came up with this Microsoft TechNet detail on Configuring system wide Keep-Alives that involves working with the KeepAliveTime and related registry variables.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\KeepAliveTime

This seems like the Linux system wide configuration for using system wide keep-alive.
But, that requires programs to use the setsockopt() and request keep-alive (right?).

Remember that keepalive support, even if configured in the kernel, is not the default behavior in Linux. Programs must request keepalive control for their sockets using the setsockopt interface. There are relatively few programs implementing keepalive...

Questions

1. Can I use this KeepAliveTime technique on the windows client machines or maybe the server?
   (has anyone tried it?)
   • Is there some other way to keep these TOAD connections active (from either end of the communication)?

Makefiles are great for automating builds, installs and tests.

But, that is not the end of Make. I have used makefiles to do many tasks like cleaning up logs, keeping mirrored web pages and downloads, hooked them into crontabs and test suites...

Like scripting, I think there is a large scope of automating with Makefiles. Particularly when you have a chain of dependency based triggering required.

What different things have you done using Makefiles?
What are you planning to do more with them, on a rainy day perhaps.