ssh login problem

[joe park]

Hello,

I'm guessing it's not exactly FreeBSD specific problem but here it goes...  

I have machine A and B, both FreeBSD 7.0 release machines.  I have a cron job that sends some files from A to B every 30 min via rsync / ssh.  About 3-4 times a month, sshd on machine B stops responding and the script just waits forever for it.  When it happens, I tried to ssh into machine B and I don't even get username/password prompt.  I can ssh into machine A fine, I can ping machine B from A fine, and it looks like ssh connection is made:

$ ssh -vvv user2 at 192.168.1.2
OpenSSH_4.5p1 FreeBSD-20061110, OpenSSL 0.9.8e 23 Feb 2007
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0
debug1: Connecting to 192.168.1.2 [192.168.1.2] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
debug1: identity file /home/user1/.ssh/identity type -1
debug1: identity file /home/user1/.ssh/id_rsa type -1
debug1: identity file /home/user1/.ssh/id_dsa type -1

It just waits infinitely at this point.  There is no other way to access and troubleshoot the machine B remotely (telnet is not enabled) and only thing I can do is call and ask for hard reset.

Any insight is appreciated.

Thanks,

joe