Entropy on debian squeeze
2012-04-12

Struggling again to get a decent amount of entropy on a headless squeeze server.

rng-tools + /dev/urandom wasn't working (and feels wrong too)
randomsound needs a soundcard
entropy key would have to be purchased and sent to Germany and then a monthly fee to have the thing connected
timer_entropyd wasn't giving me much

So I just found that in squeeze-backports and wheezy there's a package for haveged.

This had an instant effect - instead of hovering around 150 in /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail - it's now moving between 1k (default minimum is set to 1024 in /etc/default/haveged) and ca 4k (IIRC the pool itself is only 4k big).