Problem with /dev/random?
Vladimir G. Ivanovic
vladimir at acm.org
Fri May 14 13:13:31 UTC 2004
What I meant is that there are no error messages related to random in my
current syslog. Unfortunately the service was started up normally (and was
logged in a rotated log file).
Thanks for catching the typo in my command. It should be:
# cat entropy_avail
# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/random count=512
# cat entropy_avail
0
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
0
I am not trying to initialize /dev/random; I'm trying to create some
entropy (even if it's of poor quality). According to Kent, you do this
by writing to /dev/random. But this test still doesn't produce any
entropy.
--- Vladimir
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vladimir G. Ivanovic http://leonora.org/~vladimir
2770 Cowper St. vladimir at acm.org
Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447 +1 650 678 8014
------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> "ckj" == Christopher K Johnson <ckjohnson at gwi.net> writes:
ckj>
ckj> Vladimir G. Ivanovic wrote:
>> The text "random" doesn't apprear in either /var/log/messages or
>> dmesg.
>>
>>
>>
ckj> That is interesting. There is a service named random to save/restore
ckj> the entropy pool and it produces a message at each startup and shutdown.
ckj> It is provided by the initscripts rpm.
ckj> May 13 05:56:58 chris random: Initializing random number generator:
ckj> succeeded
ckj> May 13 20:01:35 chris random: Saving random seed: succeeded
ckj>
ckj> chkconfig --list random
ckj> random 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
ckj>
ckj> And it initializes things differently.
ckj>
ckj> There is a problem with how you initialized /dev/urandom, in that it is
ckj> used as input, not output in your dd statement:
ckj>
ckj> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/random-seed count=512
ckj>
ckj> Understandably this does not create any random data. You cannot simply
ckj> reverse it because there is no /dev/random-seed to take data from (at
ckj> least not on my system).
ckj>
ckj> Try
ckj> service random start
ckj>
ckj> --
ckj> -----------------------------------------------------------
ckj> "Spend less! Do more! Go Open Source..." -- Dirigo.net
ckj> Chris Johnson, RHCE #807000448202021
ckj>
ckj>
ckj>
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