having an issue with a vendor who claims the cause of a problem is an invalid 'ack' value in the tcp data. I'm using java so I didn't write this layer. I used snoop to capture the traffic on the wire and am using wireshark to display the data. Here is what is happening. After receiving a multi-packet(5) message I see a multi-pack(3) response. The first packet in the response has a value for 'ack' that is different than the 'ack' value in the other two packets. The vendor claims this data is suspect. I've provided sample data below. I'm not a tcp expert so I don't know if this is a problem or not. I've tried to find something on valid ack values and it seems to me the value should be 80018 but that doesn't mean the 78345 is wrong. I found this on the web and it seems to apply but I'm not sure: "the ack value of any data segment is considered valid as long as it does not acknowledge data ahead of the next segment to send". Thanks for your help. My understanding is the vendor has written their own tcp layer.

* source seq ack len
* vendor 75465 10924 0
* vendor 75465 10924 1440
* vendor 76905 10924 1440
* vendor 78345 10924 1440
* vendor 79785 10924 233
* me 10924 78345 0
* me 10924 80018 0
* me 10924 80018 197