cvs commit: src/games/fortune/fortune fortune.c

[Doug Barton]

Colin Percival wrote:

> I think this would be more dangerous than valuable.  "Most" failure modes of
> modern PRNGs will result in output which is cryptographically predictable but
> passes all known statistical tests.  (To take a trivial example, the sequence
> MD5(0), MD5(1), MD5(2) ... looks random, but obviously isn't.)
> 
> If we want to determine if the PRNG has been seeded properly, we should be
> querying the kernel, not trying to distinguish between "random" and "non-random"
> just based on its output.

I put the following in my /etc/rc.local file to try and do some detective 
work on the fortune issue:

sysctl kern.random.sys.seeded >> ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/sysctl.out

If others are seeing apparent problems with randomness issues on startup 
this might be a useful diagnostic for them as well.

FWIW, I cranked up the entropy save function on my laptop to the following 
values:

entropy_save_sz="4096"  # Size of the entropy cache files.
entropy_save_num="17"   # Number of entropy cache files to save.

And haven't seen any problems with repetitive fortunes in the last 2 days. 
Since storage of these files is pretty painless, I'm tempted to crank this 
up in /etc/defaults/rc.conf. Opinions?

Doug

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