mellon_create_metadata.sh never generates metadata files with /dev/urandom

[gaal-dev]

Hi. I added "set -x" to this script to see what happens.

`
...

• umask 0077
  ++ mktemp -t mellon_create_sp.XXXXXXXXXX
• TEMPLATEFILE=/tmp/mellon_create_sp.rWskeaitUC
• cat
• openssl req -utf8 -batch -config /tmp/mellon_create_sp.rWskeaitUC -new -x509 -days 3652 -nodes -out http_apache_mellon_metadata.cert -keyout http_apache_mellon_metadata.key`

The script and the last command were executed in a Docker container.

root@apache:~# openssl req -utf8 -batch -config /tmp/mellon_create_sp.rWskeaitUC -new -x509 -days 3652 -nodes -out http_apache_mellon_metadata.cert -keyout http_apache_mellon_metadata.key ... Cannot write random bytes: 4097216A697F0000:error:1200007A:random number generator:RAND_write_file:Not a regular file:../crypto/rand/randfile.c:190:Filename=/dev/urandom

In fact, this code has never been executed.

`
...
rm -f "$TEMPLATEFILE" "${TEMPLATEFILE}.RANDOM"

CERT="$(grep -v '^-----' "$OUTFILE.cert")"

cat >"$OUTFILE.xml" <<EOF`

The execution stops because the script contains the instruction 'set -e', but redirecting stderr to /dev/null hides that error message and the error reason is not obvious.

My proposal is something like this
openssl req -utf8 -batch -config "$TEMPLATEFILE" -new -x509 -days 3652 -nodes -out "$OUTFILE.cert" -keyout "$OUTFILE.key" 2>/dev/null || true

.. and to check that $OUTFILE.cert and $OUTFILE.key are created explicitly.

if [[ ! -f "$OUTFILE.cert" ]] || [[ ! -f "$OUTFILE.key" ]]; then echo "$OUTFILE.cert and $OUTFILE.key cannot be created" exit 1 fi

[thijskh]

Thanks. Were you in fact using mellon 0.18.1? Because the underlying problem has been fixed there.

As for the error reporting, you're right. A completely different approch could be the following:

• Remove the 2>/dev/null from both dd and openssl, and accept that they output (progress output).
• Move the informational about to the bottom of the script so it follows this progress output.
  That is even simpler and any error messages would be immediately obvious, what do you think?

[gaal-dev]

Were you in fact using mellon 0.18.1?

I run the script in a Docker container and could not see why metadata files were not created becuase it happened silently

# apt info libapache2-mod-auth-mellon Package: libapache2-mod-auth-mellon Version: 0.18.0-1build1 Priority: extra Section: web Origin: Ubuntu Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>

[thijskh]

Yes, so 0.18.1 should at least have fixed why they weren't created. But agreed that we could improve the error reporting of the script to not be silent.