Apologies for the apparently random plug, but I was previously posting to gentoo-hardened about ways to try and avoid bumping along with an empty entropy pool caused largely by using a "hardened" glibc/kernel (uses a bunch of entropy putting canarys after all call stacks) and it's exasperated by Linux's choice to ignore network traffic as a source of randomness and only focus on keyboard/HD activity (near negligible on a typical headless server serving files from cache...), and the icing is of course the nice linux-verver patches which allow us to cram so many processes into a small server... Having tried the bunch of software entropy generators you will find with a quick google search and finding they simply burn CPU for very little benefit - I then bought an entropy key from the nice folks at Simtec via http://entropykey.co.uk Short version is you plug it in, install the ekeyd package and even on a hardened installation the entropy pool never deviates from full up... Now, at #30 it seems like a bargain for a fancy random number generator, but then I read that the daemon can be switched to pipe the data out in "egd" format and essentially you can have one machine supply high volumes of random numbers for a fair number of networked clients. In my case this solves the problem of how to pipe entropy to some cheap rented servers where we don't get to touch the physical hardware... Very nice I have no relationship with the entropy-key guys other than being a happy customer. They seem like a small shop and I think they deserve a plug (and really need to work on their presence via google... Searches on this stuff only turn up $400 alternatives... Sheesh) For those who have no idea what this means, simply try: "cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail" - if the answer is bumping along in low triple digits then perhaps do a little experimentation along the lines of the above Good luck Ed W ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE