Re: no entropy and no output at /dev/random (quick question)

From: Javier Villavicencio
Date: Mon Nov 29 2004 - 17:52:21 EST


Andreas Steinmetz wrote:
Jan Engelhardt wrote:

I doubt that timer and eth* are a non-predictable source. As such, they should
not contribute to the entropy. Better is the keyboard and/or mouse. SSH traffic
is network traffic, and if you send it to a network card, you can expect an
interrupt at <time>... prdictable.


Timer, ok. But network - only if you are in full control of the network segment the system is attached to which may be the case for your private network but usually you can't predict what network traffic is actually going on.
I'm in control of "one" of the network segments, the other is connected to the internet which is a bad source of entropy I know, so I've enabled the SA_SAMPLE_RANDOM in the request_irq() call just for my local lan nic, but the "other" source of good entropy should be the DAC(RAID) controller, right?, I was just curious about why this driver didn't had this flag enabled in its request_irq call.

--

Javier Villavicencio
Administrador/Consultor
Direccion Nacional de Migraciones
Ministerio del Interior
Republica Argentina
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