Re: [Xmpppy-devel] Waiting for /dev/random on import xmpp

[Norman R. <no...@ra...>]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 12:03 AM, Patrick Nagel <ma...@pa...>wrote:

> Hi Norman,
>
> On 2010-01-31 23:39 UTC Norman Rasmussen wrote:
> > lol, reading /dev/random only occurs on import, so are you
> > relaunching the python script very often?
>
> Well, it gets started whenever some video compression process finishes
> on that server (I then get notified via XMPP).
>
> > btw, my 2.6.32 kernel doesn't mix network traffic into the random
> > entropy pool, does rng-tools do that?
>
> I don't use rng-tools. If my kernel (2.6.31.something) doesn't get
> entropy from the network, I wouldn't know where else it could get it (it
> doesn't have a keyboard or a mouse connected - just the mainboard, CPU
> and two SATA HDDs in that box). Maybe from HDD activity? In any case,
> those torrents help ;)


yea, I think keyboard, mouse and disk io are the only places that entropy is
gathered from.  I found randomsound (uses alsa's arecord to gather entropy),
but it's command line for arecord is hardcoded and doesn't work on my server
- default recording device doesn't support mono recording and the command
line is hard coded :-(

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 11:55 PM, Norman Rasmussen <no...@ra...>
 wrote:

> btw, dnspython 1.8 doesn't seed the entropy pool unless it's needed.  it
> also uses os.random if possible.  both of these should help remove the
> hangs.
>

actually it uses os.urandom now, and if that fails it reads from
/dev/urandom, so fixed both ways.

-- 
- Norman Rasmussen
- Email: no...@ra...
- Home page: http://norman.rasmussen.co.za/