Open Stack

I've seen this issue exactly when running openstack in a vm.  There is a line of code in the cloud init script in the ttylinux image which checks its processor speed and disables generating keys and starting sshd if it is too low.  If you feel comfortable mounting and hacking the image you can disable it.  It is somewhere in the /etc/init.d scripts.  As to the intermittency, I noticed that sometimes my virtualbox was reporting the processor speed of the host as lower than the host machine, and therefore qemu in software mode would be reporting a very slow processor to the guest. I never tracked down exactly whty this was happening but my guess was that it was related to speed-stepping of the host machine. e.g. If I booted the vm when I wasn't plugged in, a low speed was reported.

This seemed to go away with a later version of virtualbox, because I haven't seen it for a while.

Vish