Chris Searle
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Entropy on debian squeeze

debianentropysqueezehaveged

Struggling again to get a decent amount of entropy on a headless squeeze server.

  • rng-tools + /dev/urandom wasn't working (and feels wrong too)
  • randomsound needs a soundcard
  • entropy key would have to be purchased and sent to Germany and then a monthly fee to have the thing connected
  • timer_entropyd wasn't giving me much

So I just found that in squeeze-backports and wheezy there's a package for haveged.

This had an instant effect - instead of hovering around 150 in /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail - it's now moving between 1k (default minimum is set to 1024 in /etc/default/haveged) and ca 4k (IIRC the pool itself is only 4k big).