Re: gpg can't get random/entropy

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 04:49:57PM -0700, Paul Goyette wrote:
> 
> Not enough random bytes available.  Please do some other work to give
> the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 123 more bytes)

I have seen extremely odd behavior of this kind from gpg on other
platforms, even Linux.

I think gpg may have a bug -- I think rather than accumulating random
bytes from successive reads from /dev/random, it may be insisting on
getting as many as it wants to read, all in one read() system call.
Even the Linux /dev/random won't give it this under all conditions in
which there is as much entropy available as it wants.  So this is quite
frustrating.

I can investigate this further but not right now.  My personal suggestion
for the moment, if you don't want to chase down the bug, is that you
tell gpg to use /dev/urandom instead.

Thor