Subject: Re: rndc-confgen -a hangs
To: None <netbsd-help@NetBSD.org>
From: James K. Lowden <jklowden@schemamania.org>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 11/05/2006 17:41:13
dieter roelants wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 4 Nov 2006 15:12:28 -0500
> "James K. Lowden" <jklowden@schemamania.org> wrote:
> 
> > The rndc(8) manpage says 'rndc-confgen -a' creates a default rndc.key
> > file, but on my newly bootable NetBSD 3.0 Soekris box, it hangs.  I
> > waited a minute or more.  Is it supposed to take forever, or is
> > something wrong? 
> 
> My guess would be that there isn't enough data available in
> /dev/random. rndc-config takes a -r option to change the source of
> randomness. You also might want to look at rndctl to see what sources
> for entropy are being used.

Thanks, Dieter.  I used /dev/urandom; don't know if that's sufficient for
my purposes.  

For the record, this is what I'm seeing.  How much entropy do I need?  

$ sudo rndctl -ls
Source                 Bits Type      Flags
wd1                    6180 disk estimate, collect
wd0                 1641540 disk estimate, collect
sip2                      0 net  
sip1                      0 net  
sip0                      0 net  
          1647730 bits mixed into pool
                0 bits currently stored in pool (max 4096)
          1601306 bits of entropy discarded due to full pool
            46424 hard-random bits generated
           334152 pseudo-random bits generated

Regards, 

--jkl