Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much?

Theodore Tso
2007-12-05T14:50:27Z

On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 08:26:19AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
>
> Ok, whats going on here is an issue with how the smolt RPM installs the
> UUID and how Fedora's Live CD does an install. It's a complete false alarm
> on the kernel side, sorry for the confusion.

BTW, You may be better off using "uuidgen -t" to generate the UUID in
the smolt RPM, since that will use 12 bits of randomness from
/dev/random, plus the MAC, address and timestamp. So even if there is
zero randomness in /dev/random, and the time is January 1, 1970, at
least the MAC will contribute some uniqueness to the UUID.

- Ted