Systems and methods for determining an interval for the transmission of keep alive messages that will prevent a pinhole of a data network interface device from closing are driven by a software client on a computing device. The software client informs a network server of a first time interval, and the server uses the first time interval to send communications to the computing device that trigger the computing device to send keep alive messages to the server. If the first time interval does not result in the pinhole closing, the software client instructs the network server to send messages to the computing device that trigger the computing device to send keep alive messages to the server according to a second, longer time interval. This process repeats until the pinhole ultimately closes, and then the last interval that did not cause the pinhole to close is selected for use.