Tell you what I've been kicked of the net by a fool using a SYN DoS attack . It's not a big deal coze a proper configuration of my firewall based on the IP (spoofed) source of my attacker did work (I've been lucky the bloody "#!&?§ kid that attack is far to be blackhat).

I have 2 questions for the AO community:

1- I really enjoy AO , I learnt a lot and hopefully will! But ...
May I exclude that the attacker is AO member (At this time it was the only forum I was in!). In another word. Does any AO member may learn my IP@ (like in classic IRC)???
I don't see any reason why a AO wanted to kick my ass out, it's probably a kid playing with nmap on random address, but I wanted to make it sure!

2- This happened on my home PC. I'm thinking of changing my OS to linux although my wife & children are against its "non-user friendly interface" becoze Netfilter seems to be very more effective , powerful and flexible tool to use than the classical ZoneAlarm (& free of charge).
I read somewhere (I don't remember where) that Linux accept up to 5 simultaneous TCP connections on 1 port, protecting the kernel from crashing on buffer overflow under SYN flood attacks . MSWindows in an other hand has no such SYN limitation.
Is that true? And is this limiting parameter modifiable?

thanx guys,