sshd files to start with "PRNG is not seeded" error

Anbu flown2ski at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 3 16:34:36 EST 2003


Hello All,

This is regarding a sshd problem. In our system we use
ocrandom (a random number generator) to fill in the
device /dev/urandom from which 
sshd reads the randomness for seeding. In a situation
we stop the ocrandom and sshd. Now as usual we start
the ocrandom first and then 
sshd.  We get an error "PRNG is not seeded" while
starting sshd. When we start the sshd for the second
time the /dev/urandom gets 
populated immediately and it starts properly.

This problem is present in the version 3.6.1p2. We did
not have the problem with the previuos version 3.0.1p2
that we used.

 Looking at the source code the error comes from a
file entropy.c and the fucntion is seed_rng(). When we
add the function RAND_add() in the function
seed_rng(), sshd starts properly. Lot of code are
executed only if the macro OPENSSL_PRNG_ONLY is not
defined.

If we define this macro in config.h as below

/* Define if you want to use OpenSSL's internally
seeded PRNG only */
#define OPENSSL_PRNG_ONLY 1

then we get the above mentioned error "PRNG is not
seeded" though for the second time it starts fine.

Please help us with your suggestions. Or is that a bug
with OpenSSH 


Thanks and Regards,
Anbu

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