Anyone know of a random data generator?

Dan Coutu coutu at snowy-owl.com
Thu Jul 29 15:11:01 EDT 2004


Dan Jenkins wrote:

>> So, any other bright ideas?
>
>
> Use /dev/urandom instead. Make sure you are generating adequate 
> entropy too. That's why /dev/random blocked on you, not enough entropy.
>
> From a Linux Gazette article:
>
>> That's actually the difference between "random" and "urandom".
>> "random" will block until it has more 'randomness' to give you, while
>> "urandom" will spit up the the entire entropy pool, then give you
>> either pseudorandomness or a repeat (I'm not sure which, actually),
>> but will not block.
>
That was it! The following does the trick:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/st1

Thanks!

Dan



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