BIND qustionS

[Gary D Kline]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 10:01:00AM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 11:32:49PM -0700, Gary D Kline wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 09:15:41PM -0500, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> > > At 2003-04-17T00:51:40Z, Gary D Kline <kline at thought.org> writes:
> > > 
> > > > After upgrading to BIND-9.2.2, I bumped into the following output message
> > > > that I don't understand.
> > > 
> > > Run `rndc-confgen' to generate the key (and a reasonable rndc.conf to go
> > > with it).
> > 
> > 
> > 	As roor I'm exec'd rndc-confgen (with various switches).  It
> > 	seems to hang, or be sleeping.  Do you know what may be happening
> > 	here?
> 
> It's trying to read some random data out of /dev/random, but your
> system doesn't have enough sufficiently good entropic sources configured
> that it can provide as much as rndc-confgen wants.
> 
> Take a look at:
> 
>     i) The '-r' option to rndc-confgen.  If you say:
> 
>         rndc-confgen -a -r keyboard
> 
>     randomness will be derived by your typing at the keyboard.
> 
>     ii) The rc.conf 'rand_irqs' variable and the the rndcontrol(8) man
>     page.  To select some good IRQs to use as sources of randomness
>     look at the 'systat -vmstat' display, specifically the table of
>     interrupts on the right hand side.  Hint: the clk interrupt is no
>     good for generating randomness as it fires at regular intervals.
> 

		Pounding away worked just fine... like PGP:)

		Could it be that my DNS system was too quiescence
		for /dev/random?  (The uprocessor overheated and
		the server went down [[ bad fan ]] and I'm treating
		it with kid gloves.  I didn't want to leave rndc-confgen
		running for very long.

		Thanks for sharing your insights; perhaps future
		releases of bind will have better checking and 
		recovery... .

		gary







-- 
   Gary Kline     kline at thought.org   www.thought.org     Public service Unix