On Thu, 5 Feb 2009, Randall R Schulz wrote:-
On Thursday February 5 2009, David Bolt wrote:
On Thu, 5 Feb 2009, Carlos E. R. wrote:-
On Thursday, 2009-02-05 at 18:44 -0000, David Bolt wrote:
If you'd prefer not to use /dev/urandom , you could change the command to if=/dev/zero instead and have the same effect.
In my machine, it is slow and cpu intensive.
Hmm, using /dev/urandom on my machines, the test transfers were done so fast that I couldn't tell whether it was CPU intensive or not.
Depending on your hardware (might you have a hardware RNG?) this might be expected to be the case at least some of the time.
Or it could be that there was a large entropy pool sat there waiting to be emptied.
However, keep in mind that there are things for which entropy is required that are more important than giving script kiddies headaches, and pulling a lot of data out of /dev/urandom when there is no hardware RNG can deplete the available entropy and require some time for more to accumulate.
Good point. <Snip good reasons to not be using /dev/(u)random > That all points towards /dev/zero being a good source then. Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: http://www.distributed.net/ OGR-NG @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~1Mkeys/s | openSUSE 10.3 32b | openSUSE 11.0 32b | openSUSE 10.2 64b | openSUSE 10.3 64b | openSUSE 11.0 64b | openSUSE 11.1 64b TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 10.3 PPC | RISC OS 3.6 | RISC OS 3.11 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org