fwd: What good is this really going to be?

[Brian Warner]

bem at cmc.net (brian moore) writes:
> I'd be willing to contribute something to snarf a bunch of bytes from
> /dev/audio on Solaris (would have to be suid-root to do that, but
> shouldn't be too hard to make safe).
> 
> I think some of the residuals from NTP may be useful as well (the
> fractional seconds in reftime, for example:
> reftime=ba1835f7.03041000  Tue, Dec  8 1998 15:34:15.011, poll=9)

You could hook more stuff into rndunix ("ntpq -c rv") in the big table of "fun
random stuff" (I'm particularly fond of the wget lavarand one). It might be
worth considering copying the RNG code into a separate long-running daemon,
with a unix socket or something from which to read the random data. Basically
a user-space implementation of /dev/random. Should work for any unixish
system. You could then have a script that read from the random process and
add that script into the rndunix table.

Having the daemon always running in the background gathering entropy would
also make it a lot faster..

 -Brian (Warner)