How can I politely disconnect? Was: Clean way to monitor status of 'sshd' remotely?

[Furnish, Trever G]

I'm having the same issue "Eddy Geez" posted about in October, 2001 - I'm
looking to figure out how to politely disconnect from openssh's sshd, such
that it will either not log the connection at all or will at least not log
it at fatal level.  I monitor the sshd daemon on all my hosts with
Netsaint's check_ssh plugin every five minutes, so there are a *lot* of
these log messages piling up.  It would be very nice to be able to configure
sshd to ignore connections from a specific ip address/user combo, or to have
it log these connections at info level instead, but barring those options
I'd at least like to figure out how to modify Netsaint's check_ssh plugin to
have it do a 'polite' disconnect, so sshd will just log it as a normal
client connection.

Where can I look to find what sshd will expect for a normal client
disconnect?  Pointers to a protocol spec would be appreciated, as would any
other advice.

--
Trever Furnish, tgfurnish at herff-jones.com, 317.329.3397 x3519
Unix Administrator, Herff-Jones, Inc.
http://www.wondious.com