Increasing entropy

[D'Arcy Cain <darcy%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

I have been having entropy issues lately.  In particular, password
generation takes a long time.  The apg utility usually takes almost
a minute to run.

I tried bitstir from pkgsrc which does solve the entropy issue but
it does so by working the disk a lot.  Besides concerns about lowering
the life of the drives, it also seems to affect disk access.  Users
are actually noticing hangups when writing files.  So, it seems that
I have simply traded on slowdown for another.

I was wondering if there was a better way to increase entropy on these
headless servers than running the drives.  One idea that occurred to
me was to use the pseudo-random generator (/dev/urandom) to feed extra
entropy to /dev/random.  Would mixing pseudo randomness with real be
random enough for most purposes?

I also wonder what is draining entropy so much.  Maybe that's where I
should be focusing but I don't know how to monitor that.

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy%NetBSD.org@localhost>
http://www.NetBSD.org/ IM:darcy%Vex.Net@localhost