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Re: lack of entropy



Hello,

Monday, November 13, 2006, 19:03:08, you wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 01:04:40PM +0100, Marek Podmaka wrote:
>> Hello all,
>> 
>>   I have installed new HP ML150 G3, with 2.6.18.2 kernel. The problem
>>   is that I have very few entropy available (less than 200 as reported

> well, not a solution to your problem but... http://egd.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for the link, it looks interesting. I was looking something
like that, but it has to add the entropy to the /dev/random instead of
presenting it separately (for example the Audio Entropy Daemon does
this).

As a temporary solution I downloaded package rng-tools, which are
intended for usage with HW random generators. I have instead provided
it with /dev/urandom as a source of entropy. I know it's not good...
But is it very bad? It has some checks (FIPS 140-2) to measure the
entropy in block of data from the source. So far I have 559 successes
of these tests and 0 failures. But if /dev/urandom's contents is
determined by the data in /dev/random entropy pool, maybe I have
created some loop...

Anyway, it fills the entropy pool to about 2000-2500 bits every 5
seconds and it gets drained to ~200 in 2 seconds, so maybe something
is using it too much...


-- 
  bYE, Marki




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