I see only two connections to 10.81.248.79, the others go to 10.81.248.82. What is this last system?

And, while you are at it: PLEASE describe the systems (all of them) in a bit more detail: OS? application? role? So far we have:

10.80.1.26: access/jump server, OS? application(s)?
10.81.248.79: content provider (to be honest, no idea what that is), OS? application?
10.81.248.82: ??

So there is a DB server (which one?) and that sends data to this "content provider", yes?

Sorry, but i have no idea what you are talking about. Please explain again.

OK, so which server did drop the connections? Or, respectively, which server did you contact when your client did drop the connection? And which command did you execute to get this error message?

OK, (very short) introduction to the relevant things:

Every host (more precisely ever interface of a host) has one IP address. IP addresses are address information of the layer 3 of the OSI network model. This is the layer the IP protocol works on. But IP is just a means to transport data. It is basically used to create connections between hosts. These connections are done by two protocols, UDP and TCP. Most (perhaps more than 90%) are done with TCP but both these protocols operate at layer 4. Now picture an IP address like a house with many apartments. The owner of each apartment can be at home or not. These apartments are the "ports" and behind each port may wait a background process (a so-called "daemon") for incoming connections to serve. For instance, the telnet daemon usually waits at port 23 and if you connect to a system (and its telnet daemon is running) you would connect to this port 23 and the telnet daemon would answer. See it like this: you go into the house and ring the bell at door 23. If somebody is home (the telnetd) he will react to the bell. Ports have numbers 0-65535. 1-1024 are so-called "well-known ports" because some standard means of connecting to a system are located there: you already heard telnet uses port 23, ftp uses port 21, ssh uses 22, http uses 80 and so on. Above 1024 things are less fixed, and beyond 32768 the ports have no special meaning at all but are allocated on an ad-hoc basis.

A combination "IP address plus port" is called a "socket". If you have a connection (i.e. an established telnet connection) the client on your side (the telnet client program) allocates some free port and uses your IP with this port (the local "socket") to contact the remote IP at port 23. The telnetd daemon picks that up, establishes the connection (to some other port in order to free 23 for incoming connection requests again) so you have a socket connection yourIP+local-port <-> remoteIP+remote-port.

TCP works "connection oriented", that means that such connections are like telephone calls: once the connection is established you have a bidrectional channel over which you can exchange data. This exists until it is - by a standardised procedure - torn down.

I hope this helps.

bakunin