Entropy in /dev/random ?
The Linode is running Debian 6. I'm following instructions at
When I try to generate a key for a TSIG signature, the dnssec-keygen command hangs:
dnssec-keygen -a HMAC-MD5 -b 512 -n USER ns-yyrrll-net_rndc-key
A little google-fu suggests the problem may be lack of entropy in /dev/random. When I cat /dev/random to a file, the file ends up empty.
So how do I get more entropy into /dev/random?
3 Replies
In addition to advocatux's suggestion, you can also feed the entropy pool by writing data to /dev/random. You could generate the data on your local machine (which presumably has plenty of entropy) with a command like dd if=/dev/random of=~/datafile count=1.
while true ; do mandb ; done
I find that's the quickest way to generate entropy when I need it.