Yeah, I've seen a lot of code doing "the right thing" and trusting TCP to monitor connections. I trust none of it. My application layer always pings some status

Yeah, I've seen a lot of code doing "the right thing" and trusting TCP to monitor connections. I trust none of it. My application layer always pings some status back and forth at regular intervals and both ends will disconnect after an explicitly set timeout. I'm sure there are situations (probably most static web server stuff) where this is a terrible idea but for realtime(ish) remote control it's the only way to go.