I just installed Hardy Heron on a webserver and found ssh over the LAN paused for a long time after connecting and before asking for the password (or connecting with ssh key).
The problem is some kind of reverse DNS lookup that doesn’t work on the LAN. After some digging and going down some blind alleys with Kerberos I found the answer buried in this thread.
On the machine being connected to (remote side/server side)
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
UseDNS no