[omniORB] bidirectional omniORB, NAT and idle timeouts

[Michael Teske]

Hi,

since a while we tested omniORB with bidirectional switched on.

Our architecture heavily relies on callback object, and with bidirectional we don't need to

keep a listen port on the client open - which often leads to security discussions these days.


So we finally went live with this configuration, and all worked fine, except: The connections

from the client to the server processes goes over NAT, and the NAT server they use disables idle connections

after about 45 minutes.

Without bidir, omniORB itself closes idle connections after a while an transparently opens them, if a call

has to be made. Obviously this cannot be done in the bidirectional scenario, so if a connection from client to server

is idle for a longer time, gets disabled and then the server wants to call a callback, it sends something and

gets a recv error afterward, which leads to an exception (of course it cannot re-open the connection) like this

omniORB: (53) 2026-08-12 16:00:00.959212: Error in network receive (start of message): giop:ssl:[::ffff:10.49.64.240]:52284
omniORB: (53) 2026-08-12 16:00:00.959225: throw giopStream::CommFailure from giopStream.cc:857(0,NO,COMM_FAILURE_UnMarshalArguments)
omniORB: (53) 2026-08-12 16:00:00.959333: Bi-directional strand 0x7f71ec00e950 is dying after handling a callback.
omniORB: (55) 2026-08-12 16:00:00.959346: Reset rope addresses (current address giop:ssl:[::ffff:10.49.64.240]:52284)
omniORB: (55) 2026-08-12 16:00:00.959356: Connection closed while waiting for a reply on a bidirectional connection: giop:ssl:[::ffff:10.49.64.240]:52284
omniORB: (55) 2026-08-12 16:00:00.959359: throw giopStream::CommFailure from giopImpl12.cc:581(0,MAYBE,COMM_FAILURE_WaitingForReply)


Is there any solution for this available yet? I thought about hacking TCP_KEEPIDLE on linux into the socket options,

but before doing that I thought I ask here first.

Any help appreciated.

Regards,

   Michael