1.4.3: Installer hangs at timezone selection

[Oliver Fromme]

Simon 'corecode' Schubert <corecode at xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 > Oliver Fromme wrote:
 >>>> However -- The one thing which is extremely annoying is
 >>>> the pause during boot, when the sshd DSA host keys are
 >>>> generated.  It takes 29 minutes (!) on my hardware.  It
 >> Sorry, I should have been more clear.  My criticism wasn't
 >> meant to be about the fact that the keys are created, or
 >> that it takes so long -- you can't change that anyway if
 >> you need sshd.  My point rather was that there should be
 >> a bit more verbose output, so the user knows that the box
 >> isn't deadlocked or something.
 > 
 > Can we launch this in the background?  Installation can proceed without 
 > sshd, and if you need remote access, well, you just have to wait.

I didn't think of that ...  But it should be possible to
run it in the background with a reasonable nice level.
However, it would have to be clearly documented, so it
doesn't lead to further confusion.  It also leads to the
question how to signal to the user when the background
process is done, so he can log in from remote.

Howeven, I was rather thinking about adding one or two echo
commands to the script.  Something along the lines:
<snip>
***
***  SSH host key generation may take a while, please be patient.
***  If you don't need sshd(8), you can skip this with Ctrl-C.
***
</snip>

It would also be extremely nice if ssh_keygen could display
a progress bar or percent value.  But that would have to be
done by the OpenSSH folks, of course, not DragonFly.

 > Do you know if needs 29 minutes of CPU time, or does it just have to 
 > wait so long until all neccessary entropy has been gathered?  Maybe 
 > there is still a but in entropy gathering somewhere.

I'm pretty sure it needs 29 minutes of CPU time.  Most of
the time was spent generating the DSA key.  The RSA key was
much quicker, maybe half a minute (I didn't measure).
The CPU was 100% busy while generating the keys.

On a faster machine the whole process took considerably
less time; about 1 minute.  But that's still a long pause
during boot which can give users (especially newbies) an
uneasy feeling.

(Just my 2 cents.)

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd

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