During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux ready for release. The initial problem I looked at was particularly interesting.
The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from scratch. I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors, remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and wrap up its tasks.
Eventually the cause was found. The kernel was simply running out of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more. Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but because I was typing.
The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to generate some disk IO. Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to generate entropy.
The fix is in beta1 of the Debian Edu/Squeeze version, and we welcome more testers and developers. We plan to release beta2 this weekend.
