[Mimedefang] anomalies under high load

[Kenneth Porter]

I had my system go to a high load due to a hung modprobe. (I tried to 
reload my iptables firewall and the attempt to unload the nat module spun.) 
This resulted in lots of anomalies in my maillog. I eventually noticed the 
problem and niced the modprobe process until I could get a chance to reboot.

One anomaly was that sendmail reported a milter error trying to talk to MD. 
Another was that greet_pause would start reporting pre-greet traffic from 
legitimate peers (in this example, my MX backup).

Feb  3 04:15:53 newred sendmail[851]: j13CErYx000851: Milter (mimedefang): 
timeout before data read
Feb  3 04:15:53 newred sendmail[851]: j13CErYx000851: Milter (mimedefang): 
to error state
Feb  3 04:15:53 newred sendmail[851]: j13CErYx000851: Milter (mimedefang): 
init failed to open
Feb  3 04:15:53 newred sendmail[851]: j13CErYx000851: Milter (mimedefang): 
to error state
Feb  3 04:15:53 newred sendmail[851]: j13CErYx000851: Milter: 
initialization failed, temp failing commands
Feb  3 04:15:53 newred sendmail[851]: j13CErYx000851: rejecting commands 
from [69.17.55.168] [69.17.55.168] due to pre-greeting traffic

Is this a reasonable thing to see under these conditions? Or is it 
indicative of a problem in sendmail?