Subversion And The Entropy Pool
I ran into an interesting little subversion problem earlier. I was trying to commit a change, and the commit just seemed to hang indefinitely. I couldn’t sent an interrupt, and eventually resorted to killing the process. I tried all sorts of command line options in case there was an authentication problem - with no luck. I then thought I had made a mistake when switching my working copy to a different branch. I checked the logs on the server to find nothing pertinent; it seemed as though svn didn’t get as far as taking to the server. At a loss, I thought there was nothing for it but to run the command with strace. Bingo!
strace showed that subversion reads from /dev/random as part of the commit, and that’s where the problem seemed to be
happening. After doing some research, I discovered that /dev/random generates random numbers using the so-called
entropy pool. This entropy pool is just random bits of noise generated from things such as mouse movements, time
between keystrokes and so on. For whatever reason, on the client server, this entropy pool was empty! Using
/dev/random is cryptographically more random than using /dev/urandom; and /dev/random blocks when the entropy
pool is empty, whereas /dev/urandom is non-blocking. Moving /dev/random to /dev/random.old and linking
/dev/urandom to /dev/random solved the problem. There may be a better solution to this, and depending on your
cryptographic requirements it might be better to find an alternative, but this did the trick for me. One svn commit
later and all was well.