unresponsive terminal - cannot access linode

I started having a problem with my Linode yesterday that I can't seem to resolve. When I ssh into my machine, I see the command prompt but it is completely unresponsive. I tried a second approach, via Linode's AJAX console, but had the same problem (with an error message this time.) Finally, I used the LISH Shell for console access, and ran logview for more details. Here's the trouble spot:

...
FATAL: Module nf_conntrack_ftp not found.
FATAL: Module nf_nat_ftp not found.
FATAL: Module nf_conntrack_irc not found.
FATAL: Module nf_nat_irc not found.
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16
/dev/xvda: clean, 88137/1925120 files, 896003/7680000 blocks
 * Stopping NTP server ntpd
 * Setting preliminary keymap...                                                   ...done. MySQL database server mysqld           
 * Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables.
 * Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent postfix                                 * Starting web server apache2       
Ubuntu 9.10 machinename hvc0
machinename login:  * Starting NTP server ntpd
 * Stopping NTP server ntpd
 * Starting NTP server ntpd
...

Some googling suggested that this may have something to do with ufw (which I have been modifying recently). I'm wondering if I should reboot, or if that will make things more complicated to resolve. Other processes running on the machine continues to run without problem (e.g. apache).

Any suggestions on what to do would be much appreciated.