On 8/30/06, Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello, > On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Andrew Donnellan wrote: >>> On 8/25/06, Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> So what would be the alternative? Would we have to use a makefile hack >> (e.g. test for the existence of /dev/random and set a compile flag) or >> something to figure out what random seed we should use? Usually, you would do a test in ./configure. > Unless you need cryptographically secure random-ness (which is > unlikely since this is a test suite) any pseudo-random generator > should be adequate as a source of randomness. So you could use (for > example) some post-header portion of a gzipped file. Of course, this > gives you "deterministic random-ness" which sounds like an > oxymoron---but isn't according to recent results in Complexity! I haven't actually looked at the source. If this is just a test suite, and it isn't actually used for anything important, then it may be sufficient to just use the output of time(2). I really don't know why they're using rdtsc as a source of randomness...
Being among some STUN code makes me think the randomness may actually be used for some encryption or as some sort of UID.
It's probably not a good idea to use a portion of a known file, since then your seed is completely deterministic, and you lose the advantage of setting a seed. >> Also would it be OK to include this as a Debian patch, esp. because at >> the moment Debian doesn't have any non-glibc ports? IMHO, if you include this as a Debian-only patch, then it would be best to get rid of the whole #if section, and put in the "this should work for all Debian ports" code, instead of having an #if test that tests the wrong thing. But that's just IMHO. But I think that upstream probably would want to have a more general fix. And IMHO, we should always try to come up with general fixes, instead of just Debian-specific fixes.
Well it seems that unless someone else can come up with a fix this is what I'll have to do. A configure fix would be nice but I don't have the time to do it. andrew -- Andrew Donnellan http://andrewdonnellan.com http://ajdlinux.blogspot.com Jabber - [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG - hkp://subkeys.pgp.net 0x5D4C0C58 ------------------------------- Member of Linux Australia - http://linux.org.au Debian user - http://debian.org Get free rewards - http://ezyrewards.com/?id=23484 OpenNIC user - http://www.opennic.unrated.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
