Ask HN: How to ensure reasonable entropy in Linux?

2 points

12 years ago

So today I am trying to install FreeIPA in a VM on Proxmox VE. Neither the hypervisor nor the guest seem to have sufficient entropy to complete the install, per the developers. On advice from IRC, I found out how to check entropy using 'cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail'.

Results:

  - desktop: 1456

  - hypervisor: 262

  - guest: 94

Suggestions I've seen so far are:

1. Implement VirtIO-RNG for my VM. This would share and throttle the hypervisor's /dev/random with the guest. This does little good IMHO, if even the hypervisor is starved of entropy. http://wiki.qemu-project.org/Features-Done/VirtIORNG

2. haveged - "A simple entropy daemon"; Any thoughts on this? http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/

I would enjoy having a hardware RNG, but I wonder what software can do to solve this issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_hardware_random_number_generators

I seem to remember the random numbers as a service post about the NIST recently. Is that worth looking into for this?

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