rndc-confgen just hangs

[John Hascall]

> Will Yardley <&- at no.spam.veggiechinese.net> writes:
> >I have a FreeBSD 4.11 machine where rndc-confgen -a just fails.
> >rndc-confgen prints its usage information if I run it with bogus args,
> >so it's not *totally* failing.
> 
> >/dev/random exists, and I have the same exact binary package of BIND on
> >another machine where it seems to work fine. BIND itself is working
> >fine, and "ldd /usr/local/sbin/rndc-confgen" doesn't show any missing
> >libs.

> You need more entropy for /dev/random.
> See rndcontrol.

This script excerpt which I use for another consumer of entropy
on startup may be of some help:

kadmind5_precmd() {
	need=2880
	d=ld2a
	b=8192
	while : ; do
		bits=`/sbin/rndctl -s | awk '$3 == "currently" {print $1}'`
		echo "Have $bits of entropy"
		[ $bits -ge $need ] && break
		echo "Not enough entropy for kadmin5, trying to make some"
		x=`date +%M%S`
		dd if=/dev/r$d of=/dev/null bs=$b skip=$x count=$x 2>/dev/null
	done
	echo "Entropy should be sufficient to start kadmind5"
}

(*This is on NetBSD, you may need slight changes for FreeBSD*)
Also rndc-confgen might need more or less than 2880 bits.



John