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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 21 2018, @06:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the chaos-monkey dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 22 2018, @09:41PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday December 22 2018, @09:41PM (#777667) Journal

    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.

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