Fedora fails to generate SSH2 RSA key

Hmm… Depleted /dev/random on the hardware host?

My biggest suggestion is that you should be using Slackware anyway, but then that's my biggest suggestion for everything…

@kmweber:

My biggest suggestion is that you should be using Slackware anyway, but then that's my biggest suggestion for everything…

Sorry, but your suggestion isn't much of a suggestion because it doesn't take any factor into consideration. Perhaps the software I am wanting to run doesn't run on Slackware. Or maybe my client only wants to use Fedora. Or maybe I only want to use Fedora. Suggesting I use a different OS simply because I have a problem (which may or may not be OS related) is not useful and not appreciated.

@rsk:

Hmm… Depleted /dev/random on the hardware host?
+1

If they are using /dev/random to generate the host keys (as they should), it can take a long time on a freshly booted VPS to accumulate enough entropy. Are you waiting a long time before you give up and call it hung?

For what it's worth, each kernel (and thus Linode) has its own entropy pool, distinct from the host; /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail has the number of bytes available. It's usually not a big number.

@Stever:

@rsk:

Hmm… Depleted /dev/random on the hardware host?
+1

If they are using /dev/random to generate the host keys (as they should), it can take a long time on a freshly booted VPS to accumulate enough entropy. Are you waiting a long time before you give up and call it hung?

At one point I waited several hours. When I finally gave up I went through the process again and it worked fine.

@kmweber:

My biggest suggestion is that you should be using Slackware anyway, but then that's my biggest suggestion for everything…

And this is why Slackware has such a bad name.

.llort