Question

setting up VPN on Ubuntu 16.04 build-ca error message

Running Ubuntu 16.04 on a HP Pavilion laptop In following your tutorial “How to set Up an OpenVPN server on Ububtu 16.04” I got to step 4 “Build the Certificate Authority” and when I ran the ./build-ca command I got the following output:

Generating a 2048 bit RSA private key …+++ …+++ unable to write ‘random state’ writing new private key to ‘ca.key’

As you can see it is telling me it can not write the random state. I want to know if I can ignore this message and continue or what I might try to fix it.

Any and all help is appreciated.

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Flamber Hansen • June 3, 2017
Accepted Answer

Hi @raygolost

It’s usually because your .rnd is not owned by the user. You can remove it:

sudo rm ~/.rnd

You can read more here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/94445/using-openssl-what-does-unable-to-write-random-state-mean