Why does configure hang when generating a private key with GnuTLS?
Occasionally, the SSL certificate generation during configure (‘generating your private key’) will take an unreasonably long time when you’re using gnutls, but it happens almost instantly using openssl. This is due to some differences in how the two SSL libraries generate keys. When using SSL, the private key is what proves that your server is who it claims to be and is vital to the security of the SSL connection. Anyone who can guess your private key can imitate your server. As such, they’re very important. When generating them, the SSL tool will gather random numbers based on the least predictable data it can find (called entropy). When generating a private key, OpenSSL will read 1024 bytes of permanently saved random data from a file called ‘.rnd’, and it will use 32 bytes of random data from a less reliable source (/dev/urandom), as well as some other relatively predictable facts about it’s environment. The result is that your certificates are generated very quickly, but with very
