8.0-RELEASE Hanging on boot-up/Harvesting

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:34:19 +0000 (GMT), Andy Hiscock <andyjhiscock at yahoo.com> wrote:
> All went well except when it comes to boot-up.   Works though the
> config until it gets to some sort of networking routine/initiating.
> The line said something about "Harvesting ppp/Ethernet"?

This looks like the entropy line.

And it sounds familiar to me. I remember that I saw this
with an older version (maybe 5) of FreeBSD, but I can't
remember what I did to resolve the problem... maybe it
had something to do with defective hardware (NIC)..?



> Has anyone come across this problem/is there a work around? 

> I've tried turning things like power management and Loading BIOS
> default settings.

Try to extract or disable the NIC - just a wild guess,
nothing coming from an educated background! :-)

>From a more educated background, maybe this is interesting
for you: The rc.conf file may contain settings to control
the entropy harvesting; from defaults/rc.conf:

entropy_file="/entropy" # Set to NO to disable caching entropy through reboots.
                        # /var/db/entropy-file is preferred if / is not avail.
entropy_dir="/var/db/entropy" # Set to NO to disable caching entropy via cron.
entropy_save_sz="2048"  # Size of the entropy cache files.
entropy_save_num="8"    # Number of entropy cache files to save.
harvest_interrupt="YES" # Entropy device harvests interrupt randomness
harvest_ethernet="YES"  # Entropy device harvests ethernet randomness
harvest_p_to_p="YES"    # Entropy device harvests point-to-point randomness

The rc.d/initrandom, rc.d/random and rc.d/sshd scripts also
participate in the entropy process. Maybe you can check if
they require some resources that are not available at boot
time... again, this is a quite uneducated guess. :-)



> Machine Im using it on is an Celeron 800 - Old but tends to
> be reliable ;)

Don't mind - completely fine for a server.



> Sorry I haven't got the error exact error.

As I said, it seems that it's about the entropy harvesting.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...