Boot freezes at Starting Courier-POP3 (SSL) generating-ssl-certificate...

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi

I’m not a complete noob but its been a while since I’ve been on Linux day to day so please excuse any obvious mistakes.

When I boot the server it gets to “Starting Courier-POP3 (SSL) generating-ssl-certificate…” and “freezes” i.e. it does not progress past that point to a login dialog. Even after waiting 6-12 hours. Avahi and Courier IMAP have failed to load previous to this.
I can reboot the host using Ctrl+Alt+Del or Alt+PrintScreen+r+s+e+i+u+b so its not completely frozen but does not continue booting.

Could it be trying to collect entropy for SSL certificate generation and not getting enough “system noise”?

Screenshot of the boot screen
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gsl36tgdh8xyxhj/Screenshot%202016-02-20%2021.44.36.png?dl=0

It is a OpenSuse server (not sure on version) created using Suse Studio in 2010. Its running on VMWare vSphere ESXi 4.1.0 b260247 (old I know).
The virtual guest was imported onto the VM host as an OVF just now. After importing I booted to a Knoppix ISO, mounted the local LVM file system, and updated the MAC address in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (within the mounted LVM space) using vi, unmounted and rebooted.

I can ping the host but it refuses SSH & HTTP connections. I believe root is disabled because if I try to boot to single user mode it says “The account is currently not available”.
I do have a local account on the server with sudo rights if I can get to a console.

I’m sorry if I missing lots of useful diagnostic info, let me know what is useful to know and I will post it.

Thanks for your help

MC

2

Ok… progress.

I booted back to Knoppix and using vi edited /etc/passwd to give root /bin/bash as a shell (so root was not disabled, just no shell). Now at the Grub boot loader (local disk) I can force single user mode using “init 1” at the boot screen and get a console.
Once in the console I can use chkconfig to disable the 5 courier services and the server now boots to a login prompt normally (init 3).

So only question now is, how do I fix courier so I don’t have this issue but courier still starts at boot.

Cheers,

MC