Comment 12 for bug 250400

Colin, I was able to manually reproduce the bug by running:

   sudo sh -c "unset HOME ; /usr/share/debconf/frontend sh -ex /usr/sbin/make-ssl-cert generate-default-snakeoil --force-overwrite"

If you remove the redirection of stderr to /dev/null from the openssl invocation in make-ssl-cert, you'll see openssl's cryptic failure message where it complains about the variable not having a value:

  error on line 5 of /tmp/tmp.JOuWS24408
  24410:error:0E065068:configuration file routines:STR_COPY:variable has no value:conf_def.c:629:line 5

Hope this helps.