As you may or may not know, we use the Crypto Stick as our SSH authentication mechanism. Lately, some of us are experiencing ‘hanging’ every now-and-again. Yesterday, I found a blogpost on Ludovic Rousseau’s blog, detailing that this problem stems from a race condition in libusb. This problem is fixed in an experimental branch of libusb. As a full upgrade of libusb (from an experimental branch no less) is out of the question, I backported the patch to Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) and 11.11 (oneiric). These packages indeed solve the problem of the ‘hanging’ Crypto Stick (and probably every other ‘hanging’ USB device). Binary and source packages are available here in our repository. Or, you can add our repo to your sources.list:
- Natty:
deb http://debian.kumina.nl/ubuntu/ natty-kumina main - Oneiric:
deb http://debian.kumina.nl/ubuntu/ oneiric-kumina main
*Image source: https://www.nitrokey.com
Tags: crypto, cryptostick, hanging, libusb, package, smartcard, Ubuntu, usb
Thanks. Just reinstalled my laptop with Natty and I ran into this problem. Thanks again 🙂
Is the patch itself available anywhere? Was it ever included in v1.0.9 released in April 2012, or does it still have to be patched manually?
The patch is available in the source package which is also available on our repos. I don’t think it’s needed anymore, though, I’ve reinstalled my desktop a few times since and haven’t installed the package from our repo.
Debian provides libusb-1.0.9-RC3 (including the fix) in testing and unstable http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libusb-1.0-0.
Ubuntu provides the same version in precise http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libusb-1.0-0
Backporting the fix to Natty and Oneiric is a good idea.
The Oneiric package works great on Linux Mint 12 as well, for those interested.