I have been having entropy issues lately. In particular, password generation takes a long time. The apg utility usually takes almost a minute to run.
I tried bitstir from pkgsrc which does solve the entropy issue but it does so by working the disk a lot. Besides concerns about lowering the life of the drives, it also seems to affect disk access. Users are actually noticing hangups when writing files. So, it seems that I have simply traded on slowdown for another. I was wondering if there was a better way to increase entropy on these headless servers than running the drives. One idea that occurred to me was to use the pseudo-random generator (/dev/urandom) to feed extra entropy to /dev/random. Would mixing pseudo randomness with real be random enough for most purposes? I also wonder what is draining entropy so much. Maybe that's where I should be focusing but I don't know how to monitor that. -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain <da...@netbsd.org> http://www.NetBSD.org/ IM:da...@vex.net