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I have a Debian 10 virtual server and I have removed ufw and iptables and rebooted the machine. Upon start, the system pauses at the Reached target system time synchronized line.

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After few minutes of no change, I repeatedly press Ctrl+X and then the random: nonblocking pool is initlized shows up, and few more Ctrl+X pressed the boot continues without problems.

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The reason I removed ufw and iptables was that I have upgraded from Debian 8 to 10, and upon reboot the boot hanged at an Fail error that could not start UFW. I tried to debug, but removed it for now.

KingsInnerSoul
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1 Answers1

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Recent kernels, changed behaviour with regard to having random numbers ready early at boot. If your system doesn't receive much random events (keyboard etc.) at boot this might take "more time than usual" when some daemons or systemd dependencies wait for the kernel to be ready to provide random nombers. This is especially true for VM environment.

You could:

  • add a specialized daemon that gathers additional entropy: haveged. It will create additional entropy and feed it to the kernel, hopefully doing this early enough at boot,

  • or change kernel version. newer kernels (probably >= 5.4) have adjusted behaviour about random numbers. If you're running the Debian cloud flavour of the kernel, at this date you could try linux-image-cloud-amd64 from backports, currently pointing at linux-image-5.4.0-0.bpo.3-cloud-amd64 (there's also an unsigned version). Just use the same flavour of kernel that you are currently running in case it's not cloud.

A.B
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