How can I set up virtual sockets for high availability with my equipment?

First off, what type of equipment are you using? Do you know what protocol the control port operates on? It helps to have specifics. If the control port is using TCP, it could lead to issues if the connection is not properly terminated. When the primary client fails, the system might still think it’s connected. You might want to explore creating a loopback interface to manage your IP and avoid connection drops. That way, physical issues wouldn’t interfere with client connections as much.

You might want to implement keep-alives on your connection to avoid those zombie connections. If your device doesn’t support it natively, you might have to send periodic pings to ensure the connection is still valid. If a keep-alive isn’t an option and the equipment doesn’t drop stale connections, your only recourse might still be restarting the device, unfortunately.

If both your clients are virtual machines, consider running them in a hot standby setup. It allows the standby to immediately take over if the primary crashes, preserving the connection. Some setups use load balancers or proxy servers that can manage traffic and help maintain connection stability during failovers. Products like HAProxy might be worth a shot, as they have features to manage TCP connections effectively and deal with health checks.