c2dm transient 401 errors on some AWS instances

[larham]

Has anyone seen *transient* 401 errors from c2dm servers?  Any ideas on how to figure these out?  We detail this recent problem (from 16 May 2012) on Amazon AWS instances in the post:

http://serverfault.com/questions/392449/google-c2dm-transient-401-errors-on-some-aws-instances

excerpt:

This is a transient problem. All our Amazon AWS instances are mostly successful in sending an HTTPS request to Google c2dm, some instances are successful 100% of the time, and some some get 401's occasionally. So we do not believe that this is an issue with our c2dm registration or our notification code (python) that has been in production for over a year. The 401 errors started on May 16, 2012.

Instead, we're thinking that something in the Amazon infrastructure, including DNS caching, may somehow be involved in the problem. Google kindly replied to our inquiry saying:

I'd look for something that could cause flaky communications. Try and see if you're getting unusual numbers of corrupted or dropped packets on that machine's network adapter.