TCP connection problem

[Richard Greaney <richard.greaney.1@uni.massey.ac.nz>]

I'm having some strange problems with my TCP connection. It's on a 
dial-on-demand setup and the TCP packets are sending 3 retries before 
waiting (3s, 9s and 21s) but doesn't try again after it gets connected 
(usually about 35 seconds). It times out after 3 minutes and won't try 
again.

I have tried changing the value at /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_retries1 to 
more than 3, but it seems to have no effect.

I'm running debian 2.2 although it's more or less a woody distro these 
days. Kernel is 2.4.3.

Any help is appreciated.
Regards,
Richard