faster /dev/random

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Thomas Cameron <thomas.cameron at camerontech.com> writes:
> I've always heard that you can get faster random numbers by generating a 
> lot of interrupts.  I usually do something like run 
> /etc/cron.daily/mlocate to generate a lot of disk activity.

I noticed that things speed up quite a bit if I move the mouse in
circles for 10 minutes.  The Linux kernel sure makes me work for my
random numbers. ;-)

> And, as I said earlier, depending on how random you want your numbers to 
> be, you might consider using /dev/urandom, which is a pseudo-random 
> number generator and is a lot faster than /dev/random.

I'm a bit wary of urandom since it will cut down on the search space for
my key.  If I need to wait a few days for my 28 keys to be crunched, I'd
rather just wait.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht      http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/      (IPv6-only)