up2date misbehavingr under RH9

["Chiu, PCM (Peter) " <P C M Chiu rl ac uk>]

This morning our site network (2Gbps) has been drastically slowed down.

I was then advised that one of our RH9 boxes has gone into a loop
in trying to talk to xmlrpc.rhn.redhat.com:443.

I stopped the up2date process and also the rhnsd daemon, and soon
was told that the site network has recovered.

The RH9 box is using a kernel 2.4.20-24.9smp, and up2date 3.1.23.2-1.

The up2date log just shows
Fetching package list for channel: redhat-linmux-i386-9...

and /var/log/up2date shows the usual
[Wed Dec 24 03:13:09 2003] up2date updating login info
[Wed Dec 24 03:13:09 2003] up2date logging into up2date server
[Wed Dec 24 03:13:09 2003] up2date successfully retrieved authentication
token from up2date server
[Wed Dec 24 03:13:09 2003] up2date availablePackageList from network

I cannot see the cause of the problem.  Any idea anyone?

Peter