I did enable the net device using rndctl (estimate/collect)
however this didnt seem to help - I still didnt get any entropy
from it (though interestingly I do get entropy from cd0/cd1 in
contrast to Jeremy's results)

I did dig round a bit deeped and tried the same thing on my 
laptop which has a 3Com PCMCIA card (ec0) and interestingly
this did start collecting entropy on the net device so it
would seem to be either kernel/card dependent.

Does anyone have any suggestions/explanations or is there a
better forum for these sort of problems ?

Regards, Paul


On Thu, Jul 19, 2001 at 11:00:28AM -0700, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Paul Chakravarti wrote:
> 
> > I used rndctl to enable collection of timing & entropy data from my network
> > device (ex0) however this doesnt seem to be contributing any data - ie.
> 
> I see that "rndctl -l" on my NetBSD 1.5.1_BETA (i386) system also showed
> zero bits for net (ne0) and my cd0 disk (which rcd0d being used). (So it
> seems like it also isn't using the cd0 disk event timing information --
> or at least it isn't displaying it.)
> 
> Then I enabled collection of timing information and entropy estimation
> with:
>  rndctl -c -t net
>  rndctl -e -t net
> 
> And a little later, I started receiving data:
>  ne0                     558 net  estimate, collect
> And then:
>  ne0                    1838 net  estimate, collect
> 
> The rnd(4) manual page says:
>      RND_TYPE_NET   The device is a network interface.  By default, timing in-
>                     formation is collected from this source type, but entropy
>                     is not estimated.
> 
> But I see from your example that you already had the estimate and collect
> flags set for you net device.
> 
> I am not sure what this all means. (Can anyone explain?)
> 
> Now to figure out why my cd0 disk still shows 0 bits ...
> 
>    Jeremy C. Reed
>    http://www.reedmedia.net/
> 
> 
> 
>