is there any way i can "affect" the tcp timeout/retry/retransmit
mechanism via another protocol?

eg, i have a tcp connection to a machine in the other side of a
"lossy" t1.  i think the router's bad (it loses 10-16% of a flood ping
from either the ethernet or the serial side even though other hosts on
both sides are almost 100% solid) but there's not much i an do about
it.

it would be nice if some other tcp connection or a udp packet or an
icmp ping could somehow "wake up" the dying connection and revitalize
it.

on a different note, i can't recall (brain is toast!) at this point
exactly how the timeoure/retransmit mechanism does it retrials.  if i
had a connection that was down the fourth out of every four seconds
(or just dropped all packets), how well would tcp deal with that?  is
it a sequential retry or some sort of sparser and sparser retry until
it finally gives up?  it seems to me (imsuo) that a backoff sequence
related to prime numbers might deal with such a thing much better.  it
would be much less likely to "harmonize" with the rythmic outages.

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