Problem with /dev/random?

[Christopher K. Johnson]

Vladimir G. Ivanovic wrote:

>The text "random" doesn't apprear in either /var/log/messages or dmesg. 
>
>  
>
That is interesting.  There is a service named random to save/restore 
the entropy pool and it produces a message at each startup and 
shutdown.  It is provided by the initscripts rpm.
May 13 05:56:58 chris random: Initializing random number generator:  
succeeded
May 13 20:01:35 chris random: Saving random seed:  succeeded

chkconfig --list random
random          0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

And it initializes things differently.

There is a problem with how you initialized /dev/urandom, in that it is 
used as input, not output in your dd statement:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/random-seed count=512

Understandably this does not create any random data.  You cannot simply 
reverse it because there is no /dev/random-seed to take data from (at 
least not on my system).

Try
service random start

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------
   "Spend less!  Do more!  Go Open Source..." -- Dirigo.net
   Chris Johnson, RHCE #807000448202021