reducing HDFS FS connection timeouts

[John Lilley]

It seems to take a very long time to timeout a connection to an invalid NN URI. 
 Our application is interactive so the defaults of taking many minutes don't 
work well.  I've tried setting:
conf.set("ipc.client.connect.max.retries", "2");
conf.set("ipc.client.connect.timeout", "7000");
before calling FileSystem.get() but it doesn't seem to matter.
What is the prescribed technique for lowering connection timeout to HDFS?
Thanks
john