[ale] RHEL 6 rngd issue

[leam hall]

I can see breaking stuff if there's a big (Heartbleed) reason. But rngd in
the last patch update, and last year it was one of the filesystem
encryption methods. Can't remember if it was LUKS or ecryptfs. Either way,
if you break stuff, aren't you supposed to be motivated to fix it?



On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Scott McBrien <smcbrien at gmail.com> wrote:

> Red Hat doesn't guarantee to not break all the things, but rather things
> like ABIs and APIs.
> https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/rhel-abi-compatibility
>
> With the lifespan of a RHEL release growing from 5 to 7 to 10 years (plus
> extra years for those willing to pay for it), it's just not feasible to
> expect that the OS will stay as static as one might like.  There are times
> where a package just needs to get refreshed to a newer version, where back
> porting may no longer be an option.  Red Hat doesn't do this all the time,
> and there are some packages (like gcc or the kernel) where updating the
> package would violate the api/abi compatibility.  Other packages are fair
> game though.
>
> Taking my Red Hat off.  I understand your frustration.  This happened to
> me on RHEL 7 between 7.0 and 7.1 for one of the packages I use, and it was
> more severe than a couple of option changes.  When talking with Red Hat
> engineering about it, it was obvious that they had no idea why I was
> miffed.  I should clarify, the engineers had no idea why I would be
> miffed.  The Product Managers understood, but figured out that there
> weren't a lot of people using the package so that upgrading it would add
> features and make it easier to use, and that it was worth the risk of
> putting off a couple of atypical customers (internal) to improve the
> product.
>
> It happens, it's painful sometimes, but the decisions aren't made by
> random, there usually is a reason that it was decided to change the
> package. Whether you agree with that reason or not is a completely other
> thing ;-)
>
> -Scott
>
> On Aug 31, 2015, at 2:58 PM, leam hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you're using rngd on RHEL 6, check to see if you're using the -i or -t
> options. RH did a major version upgrade, from 2.x to 5.x, and dropped
> support for those options. Unfortunately, if you do have them in your
> /etc/sysconfig/rngd file it will preclude rngd from starting at all. I've
> sent RH a kludgy work-around. Or you could use {Puppet|Chef|Salt|Ansible},
> etc. Lots of possibilities.
>
> I'm mostly frustrated because one of the RH standards is that they don't
> break stuff in the middle of an OS. This is the second time I've seen it in
> as many years, and the "we don't see that as a priority issue" tap dance is
> starting to bug me.
>
> Leam
>
>
> --
> Mind on a Mission <http://leamhall.blogspot.com/>
>
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-- 
Mind on a Mission <http://leamhall.blogspot.com/>
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