What just happened?

[Oldfrog]

I was doing my normal forum reads this morning and when I got to Jag saw two forums with new messages both by the same individual. I read the one in General support without problem and then tried to open "Ded & Colo". All hell broke loose. I got an immediate firewall alert (Norton ISpro), the page half loaded, then the progress bar started cycling from start to half done over and over again. I tried switching to another site but was unable to open any page on any site in any of my four browsers.

Pings, tracerts, POP3, and SMTP continued to work without problem. I was able to open one page by disabling the firewall momentarily but was unable to find any firewall log entry about Port 80 being blocked.

It eventually required a reboot to get things back to normal. Checking the firewall logs later I found 9 instances of the following:

TCP non-syn/non-ack packet on invalid connection. Packet has been dropped
Source IP address: www.jaguarpc.com(69.73.128.132)
Destination IP address: 12.74.216.194
TCP Source Port: http(80)
TCP Destination Port: 4588 (also 4601)
TCP Message Flags: 0x00000010

When I came back to Jag neither of the threads that I had seen earlier were even on the boards. Was this a weird coincidence or was something going on?

[Vin DSL]

Maybe it was ghosts...

[Oldfrog]

I wondered about that right off. It's rather disappointing if it was. I think that I will just chalk it up to S happens and let it go.