Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:19:05 -0600 From: Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu> To: freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How did I Break ssh? Solved. Message-ID: <200303311519.h2VFJ55b068082@dc.cis.okstate.edu>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
The problem is solved. Sometimes, I have asked questions on this list that later turned out to be a case of not reading the manual and I felt properly embarrassed, etc. Here is what it was and all should pay attention if you aspire to use a tar extraction to build or rebuild a system. I thought of what it might do to /dev, but since the systems all use the same architecture and are all FreeBSD 4.7, I figured that the extraction would essentially be writing the same data back to /dev so it shouldn't matter. That is wrong. Apparently, /dev/random no longer works after it is overwritten although it can appear to. As soon as I did a MAKEDEV std, ssh came to life and is now working as it should. Someone asked me if I had /dev/random which I did, but that got me to thinking which lead me to remake all the standard devices. As far as I know, ssh was the only thing that did not work because of this problem. I would suspect that any cryptographic software or anything else that uses random numbers is effected. The behavior of the system just screamed permissions, but that wasn't it. Other software may fail oddly in other ways.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200303311519.h2VFJ55b068082>