Maximum Segment Lifetime

Maximum segment lifetime is the time a TCP segment can exist in the internetwork system. It is arbitrarily defined to be 2 minutes long.

The Maximum Segment Lifetime value is used to determine the TIME_WAIT interval (2*MSL)

The command that can be used to many Unix systems determine the TIME_WAIT interval is:

ndd -get /dev/tcp tcp_time_wait_interval

60000 (60 seconds) is a common value.

On most linux systems, this value can be checked by the command below:

sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout

Or simply view the file in /proc:

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout

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