Greetings,
I am relatively new to the networking systems available in Linux and I was wondering if there is a built in way to limit the number of simultaneous incoming TCP connections to a given port.

For example, if I only wanted 10 simultaneous telnet/TCP connections to port 7500, is there a way to do this using iptables or some other built-in system?

Also, is there a way to log when a TCP connection is established to a given port, and how long it remains connected?

Please note, it is not possible to have the application running on port 7500 log when a connection is established, nor is it possible to have that application limit the number of connections made to it.

The purpose of this system is to limit the number of connections made to a customers application at the same time.

Thanks for your help in advance!

Yup you can do this with iptables, it provides lot of stuff using the recent and –limit-rate and –limit-burst. You can get info on this via offical web site http://www.netfilter.org/documentati...ons-HOWTO.html and
an example http://www.cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/vi...it-number.html

Hope this helps!