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User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3)
Gecko/20040925

Description of problem:
Every few days (usually during network outages) it becomes impossible
to contact a RHEL3 server via SSH, resulting in the need to hard
reboot the machine to recover.

The only clue of a problem is logged in /var/log/secure:

Jan 11 17:28:57 rachel sshd[1698]: fatal: Timeout before
authentication for 172.16.254.50

Google shows a singificant number of people with the same problem, but
nobody yet has found a solution.

The pattern seems to be this:

The DSL connection linking the box to the net goes down for reasons
unknown. At this point it becomes impossible to SSH to this box over a
private local network, giving the error above. Rebooting the box
brings the box back to life until the next opportunity to fail,
currently every few days.

It is not clear as to when this problem started, as the problem is
only triggered during network outages (common during the current storm
season). It may have been introduced with the last update to openssh,
whenever that was.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
openssh-server-3.6.1p2-33.30.3

How reproducible:
Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
xxx

Additional info: