On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 07:35:05PM -0500, Chad Miller wrote: > This is a known issue. PowerPCs are built too well, and don't gain > disorder as fast as, say, i386 does. heh ;-) > If this doesn't do it > > find / >/tmp/out & rm /tmp/out; lynx http://web.slashdot.org/ > > then take a baseball bat to it to add lots of entropy. Maybe too much. > > Really, keyboard input usually does it. I made my key on a PowerBook, > but the keyboard isn't USB, there. Try lots of network activity and a > few finds redirected to temporary files, but I don't know if network and > disk IO touch the /dev/random code. network io does not add to the entropy pool for the reason that it could make it theoretically possible for someone to predict your entropy by sending traffic to your machine. paranoid yes, but /dev/random is supposed to be high level paranoia device. one thing i tested a while ago was the mouse, on my intel box the mouse generates ALOT of entropy (just run od /dev/random and move the mouse around) on powerpc it generates either very very little or none. not sure about the keyboard. disk activity appears to add a little bit. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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