What are the reasons for UDP packets to be dropped by the network stack
I see UDP packets arriving on my Linux box (via tcpdump) with destination port set to 25555. However: nc -l -u 25555 shows no traffic. I've already checked: iptables is off destination MAC address matches the incoming interface destination IP address matches the incoming interface IP checksum is OK UDP checksum is OK Also, all the packets are being dropped, thus it's not a problem with overlowing rx buffers. Any ideas what else may cause the pakcets to be dropped? You have another process on your machine which is reading the datagrams arriving on port 25555. We can see it from your /proc/net