intermittent failure with "Authentication response too long"

[Joe Wells]

Dear OpenSSH gurus,

I have recently (yesterday) upgraded my machine running Red Hat Linux
6.1 with all of the binary rpms generated from the source rpms
openssh-2.2.0p1-2.src.rpm and openssl-0.9.5a-3.src.rpm.

Since the upgrade, I have been experiencing intermittent failures.
The failures are always accompanied by this error message:

  response: Authentication response too long: 1433299822
  1024 2b:28:82:7b:56:88:41:40:df:96:d4:36:ae:3f:a9:04 jbw at lcfairouz

The numbers in the error message are always the same.  These failures
are intermittent in the sense that sometimes connection attempts fail
and later identical connection attempts (exact same invocation of ssh
to same target machine) succeed.

I would like to include the debugging output obtained with the "-v"
option, but I have been unable to reproduce the problem yet that way.
As I wrote above, the problem is intermittent.

This has happened when connecting to two different kinds of remote
servers.  One kind of remote server is identified by the "-v" output
as:

  debug: Remote protocol version 1.99, remote software version 2.0.13 (non-commercial)
  datafellows: 2.0.13 (non-commercial)

The other kind of remote server is identified by the "-v" output as:

  debug: Remote protocol version 1.5, remote software version 1.2.26

Any suggestions as to what might be causing these intermittent
failures?

-- 
Joe Wells
http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~jbw/