How does one adjust time to live values ????

im thinking a ttl value of 224 is to high and causeing problems with everything internet related.

What DNS software are you running? You set the TTL in your zone file. If its not a zone you are in control of then AFAIK you can't change it.

cheers

Jamie...

its for my adsl and i find that hard to belive i mean there has to be a config file somewhere for you nic or tcp/ip correct? im not running dns at all.

whats wrong with a high TTL? Only time it would reallly come in to play is if the destination couldnt be found.

I assume you are talking about the TTL for name lookups yeah? If so as Robert0380 says it will only cause you a problem if the IP address associated with a name changes frequently and your machine doesn't lookup the name agagin as the TTL hasn't been exceeded.

cheers

Jamie...

high ttls cause things like connection time outs , connection dropouts and the like. not to mention having to click on links anumber of times to get to a site. basic network theroy 101 lol

Care to expand that a little. As I've already asked, what ttl are you talking about? If its name lookup TTLs then this wouldn't have any effect on drop-outs or clicking links. It sounds to me like you are talking about the TTL for IP. Yeah?

Jamie....

i want it to be @64 not 224 i do have a dynamicly assighned ip but as long as i dont reboot it stays constant dont change unless i disconnect but im getting all kinds of connection timeouts , connection refused and other things in galeon and have to keep hitting a link sometimes to get it to go and i know changeing my ttl will solve this,

yes sorry i should have been a bit more clear

and im not meaning to be rude btw just tryin to get us on the same page.

See, this really doesn't sounds like a TTL problem as the remote site shouldn't be interested in your hostname at all, just your IP.

cheers

Jamie...

If all the packets you were sending had a very low - the reverse - TTL then there's a chance you'll get the problems you are experiencing - the TTL will have reached zero before it get's where it's going and the packet will be dropped.

Try doing a traceroute to one of the sites you are having problems with.

You can manipulate (set, increase, decrease, etc) with TTL using iptables.
For instance:
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -j TTL --ttl-inc 10

But for this you need modify netfilter with patch-o-matic.
Try google for it. There is a lot of info.

OK from my understanding TTL is just the number of hops your request will go before you get a message back from the last router that says something like host unreachable or destination unreachable. As a packet passes from router to router, the TTL gets subtracted by 1 and some checksums are re-calculated and what not. I still dont understand how a high TTL would cause any problems like the ones you just mentioned before. TTL doesn't affect the time it takes for a request to reach its destination, it only affects how long it will bounce around the internet (the max number of routers the packet will pass through). Atleast that's what I was tought....never heard of something as simple as a TTL causing connection timeouts and dropouts because it's just a field in the header of a packet (8bits max i believe).

But then i must say that fields in a header have been known to do bad things (WinNuke for example.....you could make an old win 3.1 machine or win 95 crash by sending it a packet with a certain option combo that the kernel wasnt prepared to handle....but that has nothing to do with TTL).

This is as I thought as well. It should have no effect at all on your connection stability unless it is set too low (i.e. lower than the number of hops required to reach your destination.)

Sounds more like a problem with your ISP.

slight