[openssh] Re: sshd takes 15 minutes to start

[Ben Lindstrom]

On Sat, 2 Aug 2003, Peter Stuge wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 01:58:34PM +1000, Darren Tucker wrote:
> > I don't know if ssh-rand-helper can do anything sane about this....
> > possibly set a timeout for a few seconds, kill -9 the errant command, then
> > abandon it and let init clean it up if it exits?  Comments/suggestions
> > anyone?
>
> This is a good idea.

kill -9ing may not be a bad idea for things that don't honor "please shut
down now", but I don't like the idea of abandoning the child process.

If an OS company is not coding things to be signal safe and it now becomes
a zombie it may be out there until a reboot at worse.  Quietly filling up
the pid table.

I'd be more concern about older UNIXes lacking a /dev/random to start with
since coding quality for race conditions was.. well.. =) Not always on
par.

> In order to catch this problem, I know I would want a notice of some sort.
> Otherwise it might lead to a lot of defunct processes that suddenly show up
> out of nowhere.
> (Or after a major update, when many things have changed at once..)
>

Agreed.  However, keep in mind ssh-rand-helper was designed as a stop-gap
measure.  You really should be looking for a /dev/random kernel module or
a longer standing entropy process like prngd.

> An option to leaving the process to init is to fork() ssh-rand-helper to
> show more clearly what's going on, but the log or stderr message is now even
> more important, since this will obviously use up twice as many PIDs.
>
[..]

>From here below I'm not following what your saying.

- Ben