As a fix for a connection timeout problem I was having (stupid Cisco firewall dropping a connection after 1 hour of idle time with no notification on either end) I reduced the tcp keepalive time from the default 2 hours to 45 minutes. When testing this, I simply changed the value in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time. In order to get this to apply on boot, I added: net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 2700 to the sysctl.conf file. Last week we had to move the server to a different rack. On bootup the setting was lost (it was back at the default 7200). On all other Linux systems I have (2 RH and a Gentoo), sysctl settings in this file are applied on bootup. SUSE doesn't seem to care about it (which explains why it was empty). Do I have to explicitly make the sysctl call in one of the bootup scripts (and if so, which one), or is there somewhere else I should be looking? -- trey