Problem with /dev/random?
Vladimir G. Ivanovic
vladimir at acm.org
Thu May 13 18:54:48 UTC 2004
I can't generate any GnuPG keys. I *always* get:
Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give
the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 300 more bytes)
Moving the mouse around, doing a find on files in /etc, or whatever
doesn't help.
Using strace to see what's happening, I see:
open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 5
fstat64(5, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0644, st_rdev=makedev(1, 8), ...}) = 0
select(6, [5], NULL, NULL, {3, 0}) = 0 (Timeout)
write(3, "\nNot enough random bytes availab"..., 71) = 71
write(3, "the OS a chance to collect more "..., 63) = 63
A message on the GnuPG-users list
(http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2001-July/009080.html)
in response to a similar problem suggests
What I would do is stop the keygen, type:
cat /dev/random
and watch what happens. You should get some garbage on the screen that stops
after a second. Then, you should get a new character every few seconds. If
the hard drive is working, then the number of new characters that appear will
be higher.
If you don't see this, then there is a problem with your /dev/random device.
If you do see this, then there may be an issue with gpg on your
computer.
Well, I did as suggested. Nothing. 'cat' hangs:
open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0644, st_rdev=makedev(1, 8), ...}) = 0
read(3,
and never writes anything to the screen.
How do I get GnuPG to generate keys? Do I have a problem with
/dev/random? (/dev/urandom seems to work. It spits out garbage
continuously when cat'ed.)
Thanks.
--- Vladimir
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vladimir G. Ivanovic http://leonora.org/~vladimir
2770 Cowper St. vladimir at acm.org
Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447 +1 650 678 8014
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