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Recent upgrades that depend on the new Linux getrandom() syscall can cause OpenSSH to delay starting for tens of minutes while waiting for enough bytes of randomness. There are currently not any feasible work-arounds.
Systemd makes this behaviour worse, see issue #4271, #4513 and #10621.
Basically as of now the entropy file saved as /var/lib/systemd/random-seed will not - drumroll - add entropy to the random pool when played back during boot. Actually it will. It will just not be accounted for. So Linux doesn't know. And continues blocking getrandom(). This is obviously different from SysVinit times when /var/lib/urandom/random-seed (that you still have laying around on updated systems) made sure the system carried enough entropy over reboot to continue working right after enough of the system was booted.#4167 is a re-opened discussion about systemd eating randomness early at boot (hashmaps in PID 0...). Some Debian folks participate in the recent discussion and it is worth reading if you want to learn about the mess that booting a Linux system has become.
While we're talking systemd ... #10676 also means systems will use RDRAND in the future despite Ted Ts'o's warning on RDRAND [Archive.org mirror and mirrored locally as 130905_Ted_Tso_on_RDRAND.pdf, 205kB as Google+ will be discontinued in April 2019].
Related post: OneRNG: a Fully-Open Entropy Generator (2014)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @01:14PM (6 children)
What's so hard about wpa_passphrase XXX xxx >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf? The shit just works and it's not complicated at all. Do you have trouble reading man pages or something? I have 5 networks in my wpa_supplicant.conf, and I did absolutely 0 manually editing and it just works. The only thing I edited was my init script to give me a notify-send notification when the network connects or disconnects.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 22 2018, @02:50PM (5 children)
Throw anything just a little complicated at the typical Linux distro's wifi, and it flops. Lately, I've been using PCLinuxOS on my laptop, in large part because it does not have systemd, and I'm not impressed. Had similar problems with Lubuntu.
Connect to free wifi at business X, go to business Y and connect to their free wifi, then go back to business X. It should reconnect to X's wifi, but it often won't. It'll try, and fail. The easy way to deal with that one is reboot.
Move around in a large building with lots of wifi that have very similar or the same names. The first time, it connects fine. When you move out of range, and need a different hot spot, it flops, and flops bad. Even a reboot won't clear it's stubborn refusal to update the wifi environment it sees. Got to go in and manually delete previous information, and I don't mean telling it to "forget" connections, no. Need to delete bad configurations from /etc. That's way beyond what a casual user should need to know.
Another annoyance is a curious inability to multitask while the wifi networking is working. Why can't I check the battery level while wifi is trying to connect?
Android does much better, but even that can hang itself up on the wrong info.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @03:09PM
Fascinating, and no doubt a PITA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @05:25PM
those two distros are serious outliers. lubuntu uses a DE that barely/doesn't exist/is very stripped down and/or modified. pclinuxOS is maintained by a very small team the last i checked and is somewhat custom and boutique. i would be more convinced that there is an actual problem if you had said arch linux with NetworkMaanger
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Saturday December 22 2018, @07:58PM (1 child)
I kind of want the opposite behavior. Just because I request to connect to a network once does not mean I want to reconnect every time I walk by. I want to have to explicitly tell the system I trust a network enough to reconnect without asking. My home, sure. My kid's school, I guess. The mall, a hotel, the airport ... not on your life. Right now I have to be in the habit of going in and editing every connect after the initial connection to tell it not to connect behind my back. That sucks.
As far as your other problems, I don't know if that's a PCLinuxOS thing or what. I switch hot spots at work at least as well as the windows users. (And I do have the work wifi setup as trusted for autoconnect.) I don't have problems with things like you battery level problem. In my experience though, that sounds like the kind of thing that can happen when you have a laptop with non-standard setups. Decktops were better about that. My employer tries to make sure they have Linux capable laptops.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 22 2018, @09:41PM
Need to clarify what happens with business X, Y, and X again. Whether or not the reconnection is automatic, or manual and I initiated it, it fails, complaining of incorrect password or key, though it has the correct one or none was required. (In another minor annoyance, it then sets the connection dialog so it defaults to WEP. Seems to assume that if WPA failed, maybe the wifi is WEP. But no one uses WEP any more, and if they were, I wouldn't want to connect.) Anyway, a reboot clears things up. I haven't investigated further, but I shouldn't be surprised if some data was corrupted. If there is corruption of data, maybe it happens when I close the laptop and it goes to sleep and fails to suspend.
I think the problem is the apps they chose for the PCLinuxOS distro. They use this draknetcenter to handle the wifi. I suppose "drak" is for Mandrake. Just why PowerManager (the battery level icon) won't respond until draknetcenter gives the magic "connected" popup, I do not know. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for that behavior. Whatever, I'm thinking I need to move on to yet another distro. Perhaps I will try Void Linux next.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 22 2018, @08:09PM
I haven't had any issues like that on my thinkpad or my macbook air, both running linux with no DE at all just running straight wpa_supplicant. If I move to a different wifi location, it connects to the new AP as long as it's configured. If it doesn't for some reason, the most I've had to do is restart the service (which is just a sysvinit script that disables the interface, re-enables, and reconnects using wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd). The order that the AP's are listed in the conf is the order of precedence, so if I'm connected to my phone's hotspot and come into range of my home AP, it connects to the home wifi instead.
OpenBSD requires re-running the /etc/netstart script though.
Is your wifi card really obscure with a horrible driver or something?