weird DH problems

[Girish Venkatachalam]

Dear Damien and Darren,

I recently ran into a really weird and spooky ssh problem. My brain is going to mad trying to explain that it is a hardware issue since on two machines, one of which is a Celeon 2.8 Ghz with 1 GB RAM, another is a Xeon 4 CPU box with 3 Gig RAM and I guess 3 Ghz or something, both of which are running FreeBSD 6.1 with latest version of OpenSSH bundled with it. The version string is 
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_4.2p1 FreeBSD-2005090

I did a ssh -vvv to them and the problem occurs in kex. And it is absolutely random. Here is some sample output.

1) debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent                                      
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS                                    
Write failed: Broken pipe                                             

2) debug2: set_newkeys: mode 0                                        
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received                                     
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent                                 
Read from socket failed: Connection reset by peer                     

3) debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_3.8.1p1               
Debian-8.sarge.4                                                                
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent                                         
Read from socket failed: Connection reset by peer                     

At the same time sometimes I am able to connect. I tried this from my Debian, FreeBSD and OpenBSD boxes with different SSH versions.

I looked at the code and I can see certain fatal() calls in the kex code which I believe is shared bet server and client. 

What is causing the server to die? What is the real issue? 

Thanks.

regards,
Girish

-- 
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I am wrong.

- Oscar Wilde