Bug ID 590211: jitterentropy-rngd quietly fails to start

Last Modified: Sep 13, 2023

Affected Product(s):
BIG-IP TMOS(all modules)

Fixed In:
13.0.0, 12.1.2 HF1

Opened: Apr 28, 2016

Severity: 3-Major

Related Article: K59325275

Symptoms

If jitterentropy-rngd fails to start, it does so quietly during system start, causing init.d script [ OK ] when it should be [ FAILED ]. This can cause the system to hang indefinitely at boot time at the following step (the key name may vary, depending on what needs to be generated): Generating /var/named/config/rndc.key ( 09:08:10 ) ... Similarly, if jitterentropy-rngd fails to start but there are no keys to be generated at boot time, the system will boot successfully. However, the genkeys and genkeys-1024 processes invoked by crontab every hour might hang.

Impact

1) The system may fail to boot (user intervention will be required at this point to recover the system). 2) As crontab invokes the genkeys and genkeys-1024 processes every hour, these may start but never terminate (any hung processes might eventually cause increased memory and CPU utilization, potentially leading to unpredictable system failures).

Conditions

This can occur on any BIG-IP system if jitterentropy-rngd fails to start. The issue has been observed chiefly on vCMP guests running on VIPRION B21x0 blades.

Workaround

None

Fix Information

jitterentropy-rngd now starts up as expected, so no failures occur.

Behavior Change

Guides & references

K10134038: F5 Bug Tracker Filter Names and Tips