Re: LSH 1.2 works on systems that lack /dev/random?

[Jeff Bailey <jbailey@nisa.net>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 09:01:37AM +0200, Niels Mvller wrote:

> > http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/lists/psst/2001/04/0000.html announces LSH 1.2
> > and one of its new features is "an improved randomness generator that works
> > also on systems that lack /dev/random".  Does this mean that we can compile
> > it cleanly on Hurd?
> 
> The new generator tries to run a bunch of programs like netstat,
> vmstat, ps, etc, to seed a generator. (Of course, it also reads
> /dev/urandom, if available). So it depends on how many of those
> programs are available.
> 
> And all this is runtime-issues, any compilation troubles are
> orthogonal to the randomness generator.

I have sucesfully built the lsh-utils Debian package.  When I install
it, though, I get:

Working, please wait...                                     Generating a new host key: /etc/lsh_host_keyunix_random.c: background_poll read failed (errno = 1073741859): Resource temporarily unavailable
lsh-keygen: Could not get enough entropy from the environment.
lsh-writekey: No more sexps.

Does the magical entropy generator only work after the keys have been created?

Tks,
Jeff Bailey