ssh for HP-UX 11.0 error message.

[jerry1]

I installed openssh and openssl for
HP-UX 11.0 and I get this message when
trying any ssh commands.

# ssh admin1
PRNG is not seeded

# ssh-keygen -t dsa
PRNG is not seeded

[Bob E Campbell · Accepted solution]

Where did you get openssh and openssl? It appears that you either need to configure your random number generator or the random number generator is missing. I would hope that the documentation of the products would list either a dependency or a configuration step.

[jerry1]

That's what I have been reading on other
posts, about random number generator.
But I don't see any /dev/random on 11i boxes.

I downloaded openssl and openssh from:

http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/downloads.html#hpux1100

[Jim Keeble]

First, if you are using HP's Secure Shell product, you don't need a PRNG device. It uses a shell script to come up with a seed.

So does 11iV1 (11.11), but it will use /dev/random if you download and install the Strong Random Number Generator product from software.hp.com. The /dev/random option is much much faster.

HP-UX 11iV2 (11.23) and 11iV3 (11.31) come with both products preloaded.

The HP Secure Shell product for 11.0 is no longer on the software.hp.com site, as 11.0 is now obsolete. The response center can supply a depot, for now, in case you cannot upgrade the OS.

Hope this helps.

[jerry1]

This is an HP-UX 11.0 system.

Anyone have any ideas at all about how
to get ssh to work?

[Matti_Kurkela]

You could try using "openssl rand -rand -base64 20" to manually seed the Pseudo-Random Number Generator of the openssl package. You can pick any file you want for , but it should be at least several kilobytes long and relatively random in content (gzipped archive files are reasonably good; text files less so).

As a side effect, it will output 20 random bytes in a base64-encoded printable form. At this time, however, we're mainly interested in seeding that PRNG.

This may cause a random seed file $HOME/.rnd to be created; ensure that creation of this file is not prevented.

The OpenSSL library uses this as the seed for its PRNG, and SSH and its associated tools use the random number generator of the OpenSSL library.

[Court Campbell]

I did some googling and found this site:

http://www.josvisser.nl/hpux11-random/

good luck.