If your territory gateway connects to a remote territory through a firewall, you might need to activate the territory gateway's "keep-alive" feature to prevent the firewall from dropping the connection after a period of inactivity. When you enable the keep-alive feature, the territory gateway publishes "keep alive events" to the remote territory at a specified frequency. The keep-alive events prevent the connection from appearing idle to the firewall.

Be aware that enabling this feature issues keep-alive messaging in one direction. That is, it instructs the territory gateway on which you enable the feature to issue keep-alive messages to the remote territory. If you need to activate keep-alive messages in both directions, you must activate the keep-alive feature on both territory gateways.

To implement the keep-alive feature correctly, you must understand the conditions that cause the firewall to drop a connection. In most cases, you will need to coordinate with the network administrators at each end of the territory gateway to obtain information about the behavior of the firewalls. Given this information, you can determine which territory gateway must issue keep-alive messages (it may be both) and the frequency at which the messages need to be issued to prevent the connection from dropping.