Re: shisa seems to hang

[Xris Brunton]

Hi Simon


Thanks heaps for the response. Ran the strace and you were correct problem seems to be the blocking on /dev/random, /dev/urandom is fine (as you would expect seeing as it exists to avoid blocking issues). I can do a quick and dirty work around by deleting /dev/random and sym-linking /dev/random to /dev/urandom this will last until the machine is rebooted so I can add principals, keys, passwords etc.

Regards

Xris

On Jan 31, 2008 8:39 PM, Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> wrote:

"Xris Brunton" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi
> I have just installed shishi on my Ubuntu server and every time I type any
> command in shisa other than 'shisa -V' or 'shisa -h' it just seems to hang
> and gives no response (verbose has been of no use either). It did this with
> the official Ubuntu packages and then also when they were removed and

> 0.34compiled and installed. The shishi daemon is definitely runinng

> and I have
> been through all the instructions to no avail. Is this a bug or am I just
> doing something stupid.

Hi!  Thanks for your interest.

I've seen that too, and the reason has been that a read from /dev/random
or /dev/urandom blocks.  Use 'strace shishi' to find out if this is
indeed the case.

It may also be blocking DNS requests, to find out the Kerberos server
for a poorly guessed domain.  Try 'shishi -v' to get some more
information on what Shishi is doing.  However, this should time out
relatively fast, whereas blocking /dev/*random may block for a long
time.

It has been suggested that applications should use a libgcrypt random
seeds file.  The Shishi command line tools could implement that, but I'm
less sure how it would work for a library.  More investigation is needed
here...

/Simon

-- 
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat.
Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.
  - Scott Adams