On 08/22/2010 02:47 AM, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Thomas Cameron<thomas.cameron(a)camerontech.com> writes:
> I've always heard that you can get faster random numbers by generating a
> lot of interrupts. I usually do something like run
> /etc/cron.daily/mlocate to generate a lot of disk activity.
I noticed that things speed up quite a bit if I move the mouse in
circles for 10 minutes. The Linux kernel sure makes me work for my
random numbers. ;-)
> And, as I said earlier, depending on how random you want your numbers to
> be, you might consider using /dev/urandom, which is a pseudo-random
> number generator and is a lot faster than /dev/random.
I'm a bit wary of urandom since it will cut down on the search space for
my key. If I need to wait a few days for my 28 keys to be crunched, I'd
rather just wait.
It's a trade-off, I guess. I don't do anything that is so security
sensitive that I have to have that random a number. For me, if I need
random I can use the pseudo-random device and I know that it's "good
enough."
What are you doing that is worth waiting a month for? Or would you have
to kill us if you told us? ;-)