Thanks.  Will try that.  One final question, based on the jstack output I sent, 
is it obvious that the system is blocked due to the behavior of /dev/random?  
That is, can you enlighten me to the output I sent that explicitly or 
implicitly indicates the blocking?  I am trying to understand whether this is 
in fact the problem or whether there could be some other issue.  

If I just let the FS command run (i.e., hadoop fs -ls), is there any guarantee 
it will eventually return in some relatively finite period of time such as 
hours, or could it potentially take days, weeks, years or eternity?

Thanks in advance.

-Jon
On Jan 3, 2011, at 4:41 PM, Ted Dunning wrote:

> try
> 
>   dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=100 of=/dev/null
> 
> This will likely hang for a long time.
> 
> There is no way that I know of to change the behavior of /dev/random except
> by changing the file itself to point to a different minor device.  That
> would be very bad form.
> 
> One think you may be able do is to pour lots of entropy into the system via
> /dev/urandom.  I was not able to demonstrate this, though, when I just tried
> that.  It would be nice if there were a config variable to set that would
> change this behavior, but right now, a code change is required (AFAIK).
> 
> Another thing to do is replace the use of SecureRandom with a version that
> uses /dev/urandom.  That is the point of the code that I linked to.  It
> provides a plugin replacement that will not block.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Jon Lederman <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Could you give me a bit more information on how I can overcome this issue.
>> I am running Hadoop on an embedded processor and networking is turned off
>> to the embedded processor. Is there a quick way to check whether this is in
>> fact blocking on my system?  And, are there some variables or configuration
>> options I can set to avoid any potential blocking behavior?
>> 
>> 

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