On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 06:46, Ramesh .T.S wrote:
> Hi,
>  we r using compaq proliant servers(DL 360) loaded with redhat 7.1
> (2.4.9-12smp kernel). the problem is that we are unable to use certain
> progams which use /dev/random file eg. sslrandomfile directive in few
> java programs which gets stuck in seeding . Pls let us know if there is
> a way for us to generate a random no. in compaq machines.
> 

I assume that this is a scsi only drive setup?  If so this is a problem
that I ran into a while back.  scsi drives do not contribute to the
entropy pool and on  headless machines there is no way to generate it. 
I ended up going to the server and typing and moving the mouse around
enough to generate the needed entropy.  

On IDE boxes you can generate some disk activity. find / -type f or du
-sh * just about anything.

If you need a constant source of random numbers you need to look into a
random source .

google for entropy and linux.  You will get a lot of links about this
and a few ways that can generate some numbers that may lose a little bit
of randomness in exchange for lots of data.  Cryptographers take their
randomness very seriously indeed. 


HTH

Bret


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