We are using asynDriver to talk to an instrument connected to a socket port on a remote site using an ASCII based protocol. The communication works well except that the connection consistently drops when the exposure time is longer than 30 minutes. While the instrument is exposing there's no traffic in the socket; this points to a component in the communication chain that times out if it doesn't see any traffic for more than a certain time. I did not find timeouts in the asynDriver code so I suspect that the problem is in a network switch/firewall. Has anyone seen a similar problem with asyn before?

Thank you,

Pedro Gigoux

Gemini Observatory