Am Mon, 06 Mar 2017 22:04:44 -0500 schrieb "Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)" <[email protected]>:
> On 03/06/2017 05:19 PM, sarn wrote: > > On Monday, 6 March 2017 at 10:12:09 UTC, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > >> Excuse me if I'm asking a trivial question. Why not just seed it > >> from /dev/urandom? (or equivalent on non-Linux platforms. I know > >> at least Windows has an equivalent). > >> > >> Shachar > > > > One reason is that /dev/urandom isn't always available, e.g., in a > > chroot. Sure, these are corner cases, but it's annoying when stuff > > like this doesn't "just work". > > I don't claim to be any sort of linux expert or anything, but doesn't > chroot have a reputation for being a bit of a finicky, leaky > abstraction anyway? I haven't really used them, but that's been my > understanding...? chroots were used for security stuff in the past (chrooting a ftp server and similar stuff) and they're indeed a leaky abstraction in that case. However, chroots can also be used to 'chroot into another OS'. E.g. people sometimes chroot into the OS on a harddisk from a livecd. This is sometimes useful to repair a system, install packages, ... -- Johannes
