At startup, likely to be short of entropy.

Actual behavior, and even existence, of /dev/random and /dev/urandom varies substantially from one implementation to another.

If /dev/random blocks when short of entropy, then likely to block at startup, which is good. Services that need entropy do not need to start immediately. If they take a while to come up, no big deal.

If /dev/urandom seeded at startup, and then seeded no further, bad, but not very bad.

If /dev/urandom seeded at startup from /dev/random, then should block at startup.

If /dev/urandom never blocks, bad. Should block at startup waiting to receive 160 bits from /dev/random, and never block again.

Ron Peterson reports /dev/random not very random <http://bytes.com/topic/c/answers/219952-dev-urandom-vs-dev-random>








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