I am running Red Hat 8.0 with the apache web server and all of the sudden
I am getting the following errors, tons of them every second and the
web server has slowed to a crawl and not responding to requests. I
restarted the system and no help. Does anyone know what may be going
on and how to fix the problem? The server is a Dual 1GHZ Intel system and
gets a good deal of traffic, the kernel is 2.4.18-14smp

from /var/log/messages
....
Jun 9 19:20:33 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 992 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:33 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 992 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:33 wxserver5 kernel: TCP: drop open request from
148.134.65.180/2715
Jun 9 19:20:38 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 994 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:38 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 994 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:38 wxserver5 kernel: TCP: drop open request from
10.232.131.94/4727
Jun 9 19:20:43 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 881 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:43 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 881 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:43 wxserver5 kernel: TCP: drop open request from
148.134.212.54/1870
Jun 9 19:20:48 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 975 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:48 wxserver5 kernel: NET: 975 messages suppressed.
Jun 9 19:20:48 wxserver5 kernel: TCP: drop open request from
10.250.19.205/1584
.....

All of the sudden the errors stopped, but the traffic remains fairly high.

Mike