Enabling a client timeout

[Michael Elsdörfer]

 > as I know, the behaviour for the case you are describing (packets
 > silently dropped by firewall) is completely steered by the TCP stack,
 >  i.e. operating system options.

Well, I would expect the OS to expose those options to applications. And 
in fact, using the normal Java socket API the timeout does work for me:

Socket sock = new Socket();
sock.connect(new InetSocketAddress("host", 8765), 500);

This times out after 500 msecs, while taking 20 secs if no timeout is 
specified.

Are you saying there is now way to achieve this behavior in netty?

Michael