Archive for March, 2010



SSH failed – PRNG is not seeded

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

On a linux based VPS, a client rebooted their system and could not get the SSH of their VPS. As this is a VPS, we entered to their VPS from the hardware node and tried to restart SSH but got the below errors:

root@localhost:/# /etc/init.d/ssh restart
PRNG is not seeded

After investigation we found that the /dev/urandom was not there on the VPS.

root@localhost:/dev# ls -al /dev/random
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 1, 8 Mar  2 19:28 /dev/random

root@localhost:/dev# ls -al /dev/urandom
ls: cannot access /dev/urandom: No such file or directory

By the below command, we created it and restarted SSH

root@localhost:/dev# mknod /dev/urandom c 1 9
root@localhost:/dev# /etc/init.d/ssh  restart
* Restarting OpenBSD Secure Shell server sshd
...done.

All is perfect now!

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