From time to time I encounter a problem starting a Geronimo server on a Linux system (I've always seen it on Ubuntu -- but the problem could exist on other distributions). The server start seems to hang. However, if you're patient, which I rarely am, the server will eventually start. If you're inquisitive, and dump the stack traces of the java process, you'll see something like:

"main" prio=10 tid=0x0000000040c0d800 nid=0xa79 runnable [0x00007f57a04fb000]
   java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE
	at java.io.FileInputStream.readBytes(Native Method)
	at java.io.FileInputStream.read(FileInputStream.java:220)
	at sun.security.provider.NativePRNG$RandomIO.readFully(NativePRNG.java:185)
	at sun.security.provider.NativePRNG$RandomIO.implGenerateSeed(NativePRNG.java:202)
	- locked <0x00000000daad63e0> (a java.lang.Object)
	at sun.security.provider.NativePRNG$RandomIO.access$300(NativePRNG.java:108)
	at sun.security.provider.NativePRNG.engineGenerateSeed(NativePRNG.java:102)
	at java.security.SecureRandom.generateSeed(SecureRandom.java:495)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.pkcs12.PKCS12KeyStore.getSalt(PKCS12KeyStore.java:477)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.pkcs12.PKCS12KeyStore.calculateMac(PKCS12KeyStore.java:834)
	at com.sun.net.ssl.internal.pkcs12.PKCS12KeyStore.engineStore(PKCS12KeyStore.java:788)
	- locked <0x00000000d3b5a768> (a com.sun.net.ssl.internal.pkcs12.PKCS12KeyStore)
	at java.security.KeyStore.store(KeyStore.java:1117)
...

This problem isn't Geronimo specific. But since I see it from time to time, thought it would be worth passing along to the community...

The Sun/Oracle-based JVM is attempting to generate a pseudo-random number to be used as a seed for an SSL server socket. To generate the pseudo-random number, the JVM is reading from the /dev/random device to obtain some random information for the seed. The problem is that reads from the /dev/random device will block if the system does not have a good source of random events. So, the Geronimo server startup is blocked waiting for enough random information to be returned from /dev/random. This article may be help understand the basic issue -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random#Linux

 I'm no security expert. And I don't know the potential implications, but the simplest way that I've found to avoid the problem is to use the /dev/urandom device, instead of /dev/random. Do this by specifying the following java property '-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom'. So, the following should work well:

$ GERONIMO_OPTS="-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom" ./geronimo run --long

Note to self -- would be nice to record this on our Wiki somewhere. Anyway, hope this is useful...

--kevan