Strange TCP connections

Attila.Nohl_at_eth.ericsson.se
Date: 04/30/03 

Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 09:13:30 +0000 (UTC)

Hello!

We develop a program, where more than one processes are running, and
they are communicating via CORBA. Unfortunately sometimes some processes
hang and when I run lsof on the port, when one of our server process
listens, I get the following (sorry for the long lines):

root@atebt1: netadm>lsof -b -i@<censored>:46256
  PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
25661 netadm 9u IPv4 0x3000740b1c0 0t1320 TCP atebt1:46256->atebt1:46270 (ESTABLISHED)
25661 netadm 10u IPv4 0x30000f12cc8 0t264 TCP atebt1:46256->atebt1:46306 (ESTABLISHED)
25661 netadm 11u IPv4 0x300071bcf78 0t80 TCP atebt1:46256->atebt1:58682 (ESTABLISHED)
25678 netadm 9u IPv4 0x30007449800 0t1320 TCP atebt1:46270->atebt1:46256 (ESTABLISHED)
25934 netadm 10u IPv4 0x300071cd940 0t264 TCP atebt1:46306->atebt1:46256 (ESTABLISHED)
27507 netadm 9u IPv4 0x300072edae8 0t80 TCP atebt1:58736->atebt1:46256 (ESTABLISHED)
27510 netadm 9u IPv4 0x300058315e0 0t80 TCP atebt1:58685->atebt1:46256 (ESTABLISHED)
27513 netadm 9u IPv4 0x30007452468 0t80 TCP atebt1:58682->atebt1:46256 (ESTABLISHED)

It looks like there are 3 proper, two-way CORBA (TCP) connections
between process #25661 <-> #25678, #25661 <-> #25934 and
#25661 <-> #25713, but there are two one-way TCP established connections.
My questions are: how can a TCP connection in established state be
one-way? Is it a bug in the OS, in the CORBA implementation, in lsof or
in our application?
                                Bye,NAR