try dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=100 of=/dev/null
This will likely hang for a long time. There is no way that I know of to change the behavior of /dev/random except by changing the file itself to point to a different minor device. That would be very bad form. One think you may be able do is to pour lots of entropy into the system via /dev/urandom. I was not able to demonstrate this, though, when I just tried that. It would be nice if there were a config variable to set that would change this behavior, but right now, a code change is required (AFAIK). Another thing to do is replace the use of SecureRandom with a version that uses /dev/urandom. That is the point of the code that I linked to. It provides a plugin replacement that will not block. On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Jon Lederman <jon2...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Could you give me a bit more information on how I can overcome this issue. > I am running Hadoop on an embedded processor and networking is turned off > to the embedded processor. Is there a quick way to check whether this is in > fact blocking on my system? And, are there some variables or configuration > options I can set to avoid any potential blocking behavior? > >