dev/random

[masta]

Robert Watson wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, Chuck Swiger wrote:
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>>>Consider a PC in a University's PC access hall/lab. Would you (paranoid
>>>as you are!) trust _anything_ on that machine's hard disk?
>>>      
>>>
>>I'm not paranoid...they really are out to get me.  :-) [1]
>>
>>Anyway, in the circumstances pertaining to this thread, aren't we
>>talking about diskless clients in a university lab, and an
>>access-controlled fileserver locked away in a rack somewhere which has
>>the disks? 
>>    
>>
>
>I have to say that if you're loading your kernel out of TFTP, and your
>root file system is running out of NFS, the chances are you won't mind
>loading /entropy out of NFS.
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Why? We got a NFSv4 client in base.
Not that this is a highly-likely situation today, I'm just saying anyways.

>Sounds like a tunable is called for that can be turned on in that
>environment, and possible a console warning if the system is stalled >1
>second during boot waiting on entropy...
>
>Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
>robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research
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