Jan 16
2012FIX:- PRNG is not seeded
Filed Under (Linux Tips) by Milind on 16-01-2012
Recently working on a Debian server, which was not responding to SSH connection. I have checked and found that the SSH service was down and while restarting it it gives following error
sh-3.1# /etc/init.d/ssh restart PRNG is not seeded sh-3.1#
I have searched on Google and found that the problem occurs when /dev/random and /dev/urandom are missing from the server.
sh-3.1# ls -al /dev/random /bin/ls: /dev/random: No such file or directory sh-3.1# ls -al /dev/urandom /bin/ls: /dev/urandom: No such file or directory
As it was a VPS I directly logged into it from the host server but in case of Dedicated/Physical Server you will have to use console. Once you logged into the server execute following commands to create /dev/random and /dev/urandom
sh-3.1# mknod /dev/random c 1 9 sh-3.1# mknod /dev/urandom c 1 9
No related posts.
[...] http://eitwebguru.com/fix-prng-is-not-seeded/ June 27, 2010 3:39 am Eric3 Both devices already existed, but by deleting and then re-adding them the problem went away. June 30, 2010 2:52 am David Spillett As well as making sure that the relevant devices exist (as per David Smith’s answer) you need to make sure there is actually some entropy in the pool. [...]
Hi there, I had the same exact problem and after trying your solution the PRNG issue has gone, but the sshd service is still down.
[root /]# etc/init.d/sshd restart
Stopping sshd:[FAILED]
Starting sshd:[ OK ]
[root /]# service sshd status
sshd dead but subsys locked
any idea?
I found the solution, may be helpful for others.
To unlock the issue just run:
rm -rf /dev/null
mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3
then restart sshd and try to login as root. If you obtain a message saying “Server refused to allocate pty”, then run:
/sbin/MAKEDEV pty
/sbin/MAKEDEV tty
and restart sshd. This should do the trick ;)
Thanks for the fix Marcelo :)