David Raynes

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December 30, 2003

FreeBSD and Subversion

After having some weird hang-ups in Subversion today, I tracked down a question and answer in the FAQ:

On FreeBSD, certain operations (especially svnadmin create) sometimes hang. Why?

This is usually due to a lack of available entropy on the system. You probably need to configure the system to gather entropy from sources such as hard-disk and network interrupts. Consult your system manpages, specifically random(4) and rndcontrol(8) on how to effect this change.

I was not sure initially if that was the problem I was having (mostly it was the mentioning of svnadmin create that threw me off). The thing was that everything was working fine on my server machine, which has almost the exact same setup as my personal machine. Commits were working just fine on the server, and hanging on my machine. Eventually, after futzing around with a few other thoughts, I decided to give it a try.

So, I read the rndcontrol manpage, and it said that:

• rndcontrol takes IRQ numbers as arguments, from which entropy will be gathered
• The default is to gather from none

Then I look at my dmesg output and discovered that my ethernet card was sitting on IRQ 11, so that is what I handed off to rndcontrol. Suddenly, things were working just fine again.

Minor Update (2003-12-31 09:58)

I forgot to mention the config file changes I made when I finally got all this working. I just added the following to my /etc/rc.conf file:

rand_irqs="11"

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