Re: [vserver] Bought an entropykey - very happy

From: Nikolay Kichukov <hijacker_at_oldum.net>
Date: Fri 26 Mar 2010 - 07:47:54 GMT
Message-ID: <4BAC66AA.9040009@oldum.net>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Thanks for sharing mate. This is good to know ;-)

Cheers,
- -Nik

Ed W wrote:
> Apologies for the apparently random plug, but I was previously posting
> to gentoo-hardened about ways to try and avoid bumping along with an
> empty entropy pool caused largely by using a "hardened" glibc/kernel
> (uses a bunch of entropy putting canarys after all call stacks) and it's
> exasperated by Linux's choice to ignore network traffic as a source of
> randomness and only focus on keyboard/HD activity (near negligible on a
> typical headless server serving files from cache...), and the icing is
> of course the nice linux-verver patches which allow us to cram so many
> processes into a small server...
>
> Having tried the bunch of software entropy generators you will find with
> a quick google search and finding they simply burn CPU for very little
> benefit - I then bought an entropy key from the nice folks at Simtec via
> http://entropykey.co.uk
>
> Short version is you plug it in, install the ekeyd package and even on a
> hardened installation the entropy pool never deviates from full up...
>
> Now, at £30 it seems like a bargain for a fancy random number generator,
> but then I read that the daemon can be switched to pipe the data out in
> "egd" format and essentially you can have one machine supply high
> volumes of random numbers for a fair number of networked clients. In my
> case this solves the problem of how to pipe entropy to some cheap rented
> servers where we don't get to touch the physical hardware... Very nice
>
> I have no relationship with the entropy-key guys other than being a
> happy customer. They seem like a small shop and I think they deserve a
> plug (and really need to work on their presence via google... Searches
> on this stuff only turn up $400 alternatives... Sheesh)
>
>
> For those who have no idea what this means, simply try: "cat
> /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail" - if the answer is bumping along
> in low triple digits then perhaps do a little experimentation along the
> lines of the above
>
> Good luck
>
> Ed W
>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJLrGaqAAoJEDFLYVOGGjgXnBwH/jLcRCqxm2R1mn1GdY99LMur
Prw9KA6otFSH+sTamSoDgygtvkpvE8E32DWsU02hRAEtX+lMYAxDCwTG/NFqAzj5
bn5TCTkMmRKktuBfTYXXlVhbbB4tDLszCi78x20jzpEwD1uA3yJ5it7Zih1G1RXE
6I64vGYozMbEOmZ2lNatUdT6GsywWydYrFcIerMYFWdxpoWTZ5iIG300xk2xb5D8
u3T+HelemqcyDY3IUhXu2lStXGmwWDLcLawbiEzqvYUnxbHAGpi+eAxszyuMC727
NDYMv9ZE0xxT1lWmpGJpkiT/vrz3hZfguyIalnQBKVD2aPqPlDHFl8A6n9T2SHA=
=GRo7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Fri Mar 26 07:48:13 2010

[Next/Previous Months] [Main vserver Project Homepage] [Howto Subscribe/Unsubscribe] [Paul Sladen's vserver stuff]
Generated on Fri 26 Mar 2010 - 07:48:16 GMT by hypermail 2.1.8