Internet at home was hitting some snags: I could keep a persistant ssh connection to remote servers, which is pretty essential in my line of work.

Jeff Kramer, one of the Gurus at Polycot, reminded me how to get around this, which he'd done before back when I was at MFA. In the interest of not forgetting this again, here's the stuff:

sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.keepintvl=120
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.keepidle=1500
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=1

Basically, this tightens up the "keepalive" command, which means my lappy will sent a couple bytes of data out to remote servers over TCP/IP saying "I'm still here... don't hang up on me" more often than before. Hopefully this will work like before and prevent the disruptions.

You'll want to issue those commands as root (best through sudo) and/or put them at the end of your /etc/rc file (prior to the "exit 0" line though) so they get issued on startup.

Thanks Jeff!