deadlock in svnserve

svnserve configured on Debian Sarge uses /dev/random for password exchange
handshake. As a result client connections deadlock in the case of
exhausted entropy, since /dev/random may be blocking indefinitely.

I observed this behaviour on a server dedicated for subversion, having no
keyboard or mouse. Apparently entropy collected during servicing a network
svn request is lower than used by authorisation. Just four simultaneous
requests were needed to trigger this problem.

configuring apr using --with-devrandom=/dev/urandom solved the problem.
I suggest this be the default on systems having both /dev/random and
/dev/urandom.

Jan Kuznik

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Received on Mon Sep 18 16:26:35 2006