Can you elaborate on "a firewall is flakey"? The hosts are physically diverse, each side has 1 master, and 2 slaves, all 3 on the same subnet. Even those connections are on and off. Is there any logging that can explain why this would be happening?
A firewall that times out sessions, for example...I would use packet level debugging (You have to start slapd -d packet or slapd -d packets, I forget which (or maybe even both work!)) to see what's going on.
--Quanah -- Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Engineer Zimbra, Inc -------------------- Zimbra :: the leader in open source messaging and collaboration