Question 2 player limit connection

I was working on my MUD all weekend and all was well. Now, suddenly, I can't connect more than 2 characters. See below. Rebooting fixed it but I'm scared. I'm unsure of what could've caused this.

First it was this:

Then after I rebooted I received a sys crash log with this:

The first one - connection broken by peer - is pretty standard, you get it when someone ends their session without using the 'quit' command. Eg: they just close their MUD client and their character goes linkless.

Second one I haven't seen before. Maybe its related to the first - the MUD client is crashing or doing something strange?

But as for the issue of only having two connections.. um... was the MUD definitely running? Sounds silly but if you got a crash report then maybe the game had frozen/hung/ gone into an endless loop or was otherwise unresponsive.. ?

I thought that as well, that perhaps my connected characters were stuck in some loop -- but the game was fully responding to their commands and still "reacting". I guess I'll just see how it goes as I tinker with it tonight. Like I said, rebooting fixed it, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on. I'm using my locahost to run the server so I wonder if my ISP dropped me and then the MUD was stuck in some strange loop.

Lastly, I did try using two different MUD clients to see if that would work, but it didn't.

I've never seen that second message either. What address were you connecting to?

I know you mentioned it's locally hosted, but were you literally connecting to 127.0.0.1/localhost, or were you connecting to your actual IP? Just wondering if your firewall was somehow involved