Re: shisa seems to hang

[Simon Josefsson]

"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