rndc-confgen is silent during key generation

[Thomas Schweikle]

Binary package hint: bind9

calling "rndc-confgen" without any options does nothing. Just sitting there and waiting.
calling "rndc-confgen -h" gives a little help.
calling "rndc-confgen -b 256 -c /etc/named/rndc.key -r /dev/random" does nothing. Just sitting there and waiting.

no output, no files written, just waiting.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: bind9utils 1:9.7.1.dfsg.P2-2ubuntu0.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-24.42-generic-pae 2.6.35.8
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-24-generic-pae i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Jan 5 11:56:09 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release i386 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: bind9

[Thomas Schweikle (tps)]

After about an hour it generated output!

Maybe we shall have some message it is working on key generation .... :-(

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

I suspect that it is waiting on /dev/random to provide it with data, and that:

rndc-confgen -b 256 -c /etc/named/rndc.key -r /dev/urandom

would give you a result quickly.

I'm marking this 'Triaged' as I agree with the suggestion of a message stating its waiting on random data.

[andrew667 (andrei-yurevich)]

I have the same problem in Ubuntu 10.04.3 server and Scientific Linux 6.
The solution is key "-r /dev/urandom". The result is something like this:
rndc-confgen -b 512 -r /dev/urandom > /etc/rndc.conf

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

rndc-confgen (with or without the other options mentioned in this bug) returns immediately for me. Since this is such an old bug report with no comments since 2012, guessing this was resolved long ago.

If anyone has a similar / same issue please file a new bug report.