What about the first question I asked (version/JHF level)?
I've never seen this error message before and it's not even in SK.
However, if we take the message at face value, the destination sent a packet with the SYN flag (and not the ACK flag) set.
Normally, what should happen with the establishment of a TCP connection is the following:
- Client (origin/source of communication) sends SYN packet to server (destination of communication)
- Server sends SYN ACK packet back to client
- Client sends ACK packet to server
- Client and server exchange data normally per TCP and application conventions
As the destination sending a SYN packet is not considered normal behavior, we drop it.
You can disable this state checking (e.g. the "Drop Out of State TCP Packets" setting in Global Properties), but this is not recommended.