Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 21:37:15 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Random-ness when booting into single-user Message-ID: <p06110426bd31f528ef8d@[128.113.24.47]>
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When I was at the devsummit, a few developers remarked at the annoying situation one can get into when booting into single- user mode. Something about various operations which can hang because they need some random number(s), but at that point /dev/random (or whatever the key thing is) has not been seeded with enough entropy to give random numbers. Apparently once you get into this state, you have to start typing a lot of random gibberish to get past the problem. Something about "dancing the fandango", if I remember right. Happily I have not run into this, and I think I would like to make sure that I don't run into it -- even though I obviously don't remember any of the details... I have been looking at sbin/init/init.c, and I was wondering if it might be fairly easy to provide a fix to this situation. Let's say you request single-user mode. If you asked for single-user mode, init.c is what will ask you which shell you want use. Once it knows the shell, couldn't it just do something like first execute: ${SHELL} -c /etc/rc.d/preseedrandom (and ignore any failures) And *then* execute the standard ${SHELL} for single-user mode? Or maybe it would execute some other script to seed the entropy, if /etc/rc.d/preseedrandom is not appropriate under those circumstances. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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