Installing haveged

MFT Server instances running on headless environments (namely Linux, CentOS, Ubunta) may suffer from slow-startup time due to entropy issues when using FIPS libraries. It is for this reason that FIPS related libraries were placed in a separate directory rather than including them in the default "libs" directory. A work-around for this slow-startup issue is to install Haveged to ensure that the entropy pool is more quickly populated in a headless environment. The following sections outline the steps for installing haveged in Debian-based and Red Hat-based Linux distros.

Red Hat (e.g. RHEL, Fedora, CentOS)

Note: Certain Red Hat-distros, like RHEL or CentOS, will require you to add the EPEL repository before you can install haveged through yum. Other Red Hat-based distros (e.g. Fedora) don't have this requirement.

1. Install haveged by running this command:

yum install haveged

2. To start haveged automatically upon server boot up, run this command:

chkconfig haveged on

3. Reboot your Linux server

Debian (e.g. Ubuntu, Knoppix, Linux Mint)

1. Install haveged by running this command:

apt-get install haveged

2. Open the file /etc/default/haveged and make sure that the following setting is present and not commented.

DAEMON_ARGS="-w 1024"

3. To start haveged automatically upon server boot up, run this command:

update-rc.d haveged defaults

Adding the EPEL repository (for RHEL and CentOS)

1. Create a temporary directory where you will store the EPEL repository rpm file by executing the mkdir command:

e.g. mkdir downloads

2. Navigate into that newly created directory and then download the EPEL repository rpm file by running this command (This will download EL7):

wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

3. Execute this command to install the newly downloaded rpm package:

sudo yum install epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Once the installation completes, you should be ready to install haveged